by Roch Carrier
Dr. Schultz was going to risk his life before our eyes by pitting himself against this merciless beast. We would see with our own eyes, alive before us, not only a bear but a man fighting a bear. We’d see all of that!
A voice that reached the entire village, a voice that was magnified by loudspeakers, announced that the great day had arrived: At last you can see, in person, the unsurpassable Dr. Schultz, the man with the most scars in the world, and his bear — a bear that gets fiercer and fiercer as the season for love comes closer!’
We saw an old yellow bus drive up, covered with stars painted in red, pulling a trailer on whose sides we could read: DR. SCHULTZ AND ASSOCIATES UNIVERSAL WONDER CIRCUS LTD. The whole thing was covered with iron bars that were tangled and crossed and knotted and padlocked. A net of clinking chains added to the security. Between messages, crackling music made curtains open at the windows and drew the children outdoors. Then the magical procession entered the lot where we played ball in the summer. The motor growled, the bus moved forward, back, hesitated. At last it found its place and the motor was silent. A man got out of the bus. He stood on the running-board; twenty or thirty children had followed the circus. He considered us with a smile.
‘Hi, kids’, he said.
He added something else, words in the same language, which we’d never heard before.
‘Either he’s talking bear’, said my friend Lapin, ‘or he’s talking English.’
‘If we can’t understand him’, I concluded, ‘it must be English.’
The man on the running-board was still talking; in his strange language he seemed to be asking questions. Not understanding, we listened, stupefied to see Dr. Schultz in person, alive, come down from the posters.
‘We talk French here’, one of us shouted.
Smiling again, Dr. Schultz said something else we didn’t understand.
‘We should go get Monsieur Rancourt’, I suggested.
Monsieur Rancourt had gone to Europe to fight in the First World War and he’d had to learn English so he could follow the soldiers in his army. I ran to get Monsieur Rancourt. Panting behind his big belly, he hurried as fast as he could. He was looking forward to speaking this language. He hadn’t spoken it for so many years he wasn’t sure, he told me, that he could remember it. As soon as he saw the man from the circus he told me: ‘I’m gonna try to tell him hello in English.’
‘Good day sir! How you like it here today?’ (‘I remember!’ Monsieur Rancourt rejoiced, shouting with delight. ‘I didn’t forget!’)
Dr. Schultz moved towards Monsieur Rancourt, holding out his hand. A hand wearing a leather glove, in the middle of summer.
‘It’s because of the bear bites’, my friend Lapin explained to me.
Apparently the Anglais can’t take the cold’, said one of our friends whose mother’s sister had a cousin who worked in an Anglais house in Ontario.
The man from the circus and Monsieur Rancourt were talking like two old friends meeting after a number of years. They even laughed. In English, Monsieur Rancourt laughed in a special way, ‘a real English laugh’, we judged, whispering. In French, Monsieur Rancourt never laughed; he was surly. We listened to them, mouths agape. This English language which we’d heard on the radio, in the spaces between the French stations when we turned the tuning knob, we were hearing now for real, in life, in our village, spoken by two men standing in the sun. I made an observation: instead of speaking normally, as in French, instead of spitting the words outside their lips, the two men were swallowing them. My friend Lapin had noticed the same thing, for he said:
‘Sounds like they’re choking.’
Suddenly something was overturned in the trailer; we could hear chains clinking, a bump swelled out the canvas covering and we saw a black ball burst out - the head of a bear.
Dr. Schultz and Monsieur Rancourt had rolled up their shirtsleeves and they were comparing tattoos.
‘The bear’s loose!’
The animal ran out on the canvas, came down from the roof of the bus and jumped to the ground. How could we tell that to Dr. Schultz who didn’t understand our language, whose back was turned to the trailer and who was completely absorbed in his conversation?
‘Monsieur Rancourt!’ I shouted. ‘The bear’s running away!’
There was no need to translate. The man from the circus had understood. Waving a revolver, he sped towards the bear, which was fleeing into a neighbouring field. He shouted, pleaded, threatened.
‘What’s he saying?’ we asked Monsieur Rancourt.
‘Words that English children don’t learn till they’re men.’
‘He must be saying the same words my father says when a cow jumps over the fence. They aren’t nice.’
Dr. Schultz, whom we had seen disappear into the oats, came back after a long moment and spoke to Monsieur Rancourt, who ran to the village. The men who were gathered at the general store rushed off to find other men; they took out traps, rifles, ropes. While the mothers gathered up their children who were scattered over the village, the men set out, directed by fat Monsieur Rancourt. Because of his experience in the war, he took charge of the round-up. Dr. Schultz had confided to him, we learned later:
‘That bear’s more important than my own wife.’
They mustn’t kill it, then, but bring it back alive.
The show was to begin in the early afternoon. Dr. Schultz, who had gone with the men into the forest, came back muttering; we guessed that he was unhappy. At his trailer he opened the padlock, unfastened the crossed iron bars, pulled out the pegs and undid the chains. We saw him transform his trailer into a stage, with the help of a system of pulleys, ropes and tripods. Suddenly we were working with the circus man: we carried boxes, held out ropes, unrolled canvas, stuck pickets in the ground, lined up chairs. Dr. Schultz directed our labours. Small, over-excited men that we were, we had forgotten he was speaking a language we didn’t understand.
A piece of unrolled canvas suspended from a rope, which was held in place by stakes, formed a circular enclosure. It resembled a tent without a roof; we had built it. We were proud; would we, as long as we lived, ever have another day as beautiful as this one? From now on we were part of the circus.
At last it was time for the show. The music cried out as far as the horizon. In the stands there were mostly women: the men were still pursuing the lost bear.
In gleaming leather boots, in a costume sparkling with gilt braid, Dr. Schultz walked out on the stage. He said a few words and the crowd applauded fervently; the spectators no doubt considered it a mark of prowess to speak with such ease a language of which they couldn’t utter a single word.
He opened a cage and a dozen rabbits came out. On the back of each he hung a number. At the other end of the platform was a board with holes cut out of it. Above each hole, a number. The man from the circus gave an order and the rabbits ran to the holes that bore their numbers. Unbelievable, wasn’t it? We all raised rabbits, but our animals had never learned anything more intelligent than how to chew clover. Our hands were burning, so much had we applauded our friend Dr. Schultz. Next came the trained dogs’ act: one danced a waltz; another rode around a track on a bicycle while his twin played a drum. We applauded our great friend hard enough to break our metacarpals.
The acrobatic chimpanzee’s act had scarcely begun when a great uproar drowned the music from the loudspeakers. The canvas wall shook, it opened, and we saw the captured bear come in. The men from the village were returning it to its master, roaring, furious, screaming, clawing, kicking, gasping, famished. The men from the village, accustomed to recalcitrant bulls and horses, were leading it with strong authority; they had passed ropes around its neck and paws so the furious animal had to obey. Monsieur Rancourt was speaking French and English all at once.
When he saw his bear, Dr. Schultz let out a cry that Monsieur Rancourt didn’t translate. The men’s hands dropped the ropes: the bear was free. He didn’t notice immediately. We heard his harsh breathing, and his mas
ter’s too. The hour had come: we were going to see the greatest circus attraction in the Americas, we were going to see with our own eyes the famous Dr. Schultz, our friend, wrestle a giant black bear.
No longer feeling the ropes burning its neck, no longer submitting to the strength of the men who were tearing it apart, the bear stood up, spread its arms and shot forward with a roar. The bear struck Dr. Schultz like a mountain that might have rolled onto him. The bear and our friend tumbled off the stage. There was a ripple of applause; all the men together would never have succeeded in mustering half the daring of Dr. Schultz. The bear got up again, trampled on the great tamer of wild beasts and dived into the canvas enclosure, tearing it with one swipe of its claws before disappearing.
Dr. Schultz had lost his jacket and trousers. His body was streaked with red scratches. He was weeping.
‘If I understand right’, said Monsieur Rancourt, ‘he’s telling us that the bear wasn’t his bear…’
‘It isn’t his bear…’
The men shook and spluttered with laughter as they did at the general store when one of them told a funny story.
The men laughed so hard that Monsieur Rancourt could no longer hear Dr. Schultz’s moans as he lay bleeding on the platform. The undertaker apologized for the misunderstanding.
‘That bear was a bear that talked English, though, because I didn’t understand a single word he said.’
Industry in Our Village
ONE DAY, on the train that joined my village to Quebec City, a man in farmer’s clothes was sitting across from a very dapper-looking man who smelled of money. Both men were smoking: one his thick pipe, the other a long cigar. The route was long and tortuous. After a few minutes in the smoke, the man from my village ventured to say to the man with the jewels:
‘You must come from the big city, Monsieur.’
‘Yes’, said the other man curtly, ‘but not you!’
‘Me, I come from Sainte-Justine.’
‘Ah! I don’t know that place,’ said the shining man. ‘You must admit, it’s not as well known as Montreal.’ And he added, ‘There must be more cows than people in your population!’
The man from my village felt these words like a slap. He was silent as he smoked his pipe and prepared his revenge. When he was ready he emerged from his silence and his smoke, saying:
‘Yup, it’s a little village, but Sainte-Justine’s pretty famous because of the factory’.
The man from my village began to smoke his pipe again; the trap had been set.
‘What kind of factory?’ the city man inquired at last.
‘A shirt factory’, said the man from my village.
‘It can’t be very big.’
‘Maybe it ain’t as big as some’, said the man from my village, ‘but every day this train, this train right here, has to bring us buttons.’
The man from the city, not understanding, deigned to smile.
‘You can count’, said the man from my village, clutching his pipe; ‘this here train’s got fifteen cars; there’s one for people like you and me and the other fourteen, they’re for the buttons for our shirt factory. And the same train comes back every day.’
Hearing this story or telling it consoled the people from my village somewhat for having to live in an area that had more spruce trees than smokestacks. One day a villager came close to changing that situation.
Monsieur Juste was a blacksmith by trade, but horseshoes were no longer a sufficiently broad field for him; he dreamed of business, of firms, he dreamed of big chimneys spitting black smoke. When the joke about the carloads of buttons was told in his presence, Monsieur Juste would say that if they wanted, it could stop being a joke and become reality.
‘There’s no reason’, he said, ‘why the products from our village shouldn’t be sold in every store from Halifax to Vancouver.’
Monsieur Juste, perceptively, had observed for some time that during milking the cow’s tail swings to the left and right, sometimes slapping the farmer in the face, which is unpleasant. He had also observed that the animals’ hind feet were constantly twitching and sometimes kicking out, which puts the pail of milk in great danger of being overturned. It was a serious problem. Monsieur Juste searched through several catalogues of farm products, he leafed through his collection of the Bulletin des Agriculteurs, he even went and looked in the cure’s encyclopedia, but he found nothing. He came to the conclusion that never before had mankind thought of solving the problem of the restless legs and tails of cows. Monsieur Juste reflected for a few weeks; with his thick blacksmith’s pencil he made many drawings on his bags of chewing tobacco. Once the bag was empty he would throw it out, always forgetting his drawings, and begin again. Then one day he found it! His dream, his idea, his project — now he could begin to create it in iron.
Bent over his anvil, he twisted the iron into the shape of a hook, into large manacles that would be fitted to the cow’s hocks. Such a hook would be placed on each of the animal’s legs. Between the hooks, Monsieur Juste arranged an adjustable chain that could hold the recalcitrant limbs firm and motionless. To this chain Monsieur Juste welded a smaller one, whose purpose was to hold the swinging tail in place. A great problem, then, had been solved: it was, no doubt, a step backwards for the cows, but a great leap forward for mankind.
Monsieur Juste made a few of these devices but when he suggested them to the farmers in the village they simply laughed in his face. Monsieur Juste didn’t grow discouraged; he had read in magazines about the lives of great inventors; he knew these great men were always misunderstood by those around them. He decided, then, to turn to the world outside.
With his wife, he wrote a letter describing his invention, praising its usefulness. His letter ended with these words: ‘In the modern era one cannot live without the invention of Monsieur Juste’. Then he had the letter translated into English by the postmaster: in fact, Monsieur Rancourt had learned English in the army during the First World War. And that was how Monsieur Juste’s invention was given the English name ‘Anti-Cow-Kicks’!
Madame Juste carefully wrapped her husband’s invention in tissue paper, folded the letter translated into English and attached it to the chain; she placed the precious object in a box, carefully wrapped the box and, as the postmaster had told her, she wrote: ‘From Juste Industries Ltd., Sainte-Justine, Canada. To the I-Don’t-Know-What Company, Texas, U.S.A’. Monsieur Juste had noticed the address in one of his farm magazines.
Monsieur Juste waited. His shop grew silent. The hammer no longer struck the anvil. Monsieur Juste did not work. He spent days beside the fire, sitting on the anvil, telling how the idea had come to him of dealing with the United States.
‘If you want to be successful in business’, he would say, ‘you have to dive in horns first, like a bull. The money’s there in front of you! Now us French Canadians, we’re afraid of money. But I’m gonna prove to you that I can be successful.’
A month later, a letter arrived from Texas. Monsieur Juste, trembling, asked the Postmaster to translate it for him. The I-Don’t-Know-What Company in Texas was buying Monsieur Juste’s invention; it was ordering 2,500 dozen Anti-Cow-Kicks!
Monsieur Juste had hardly arrived back home when the fire began to roar in his forge. The hammer began to strike the anvil again, feverish amid Monsieur Juste’s shouts of joy. It was late at night and the hammer was still striking the anvil. Then it was silent for a few hours until, long before the birds began to sing, the hammer started ringing out again. On Sunday the shop was silent, but the hammer struck the anvil at the same time the clock struck midnight.
After seven days of strenuous labour, Monsieur Juste had made seven dozen Anti-Cow-Kicks. The company in Texas had ordered 2,500 dozen! Monsieur Juste put down his hammer.
‘I’m ruined’, he said.
Perhaps the Trees Do Travel
THERE WERE THOSE who had travelled like migratory birds and those who lived rooted to the earth, like trees. Some had gone very far. I remember he
aring the story of a man who had gone to the place where the sky meets the earth: he’d had to bend down so he wouldn’t bump his head against the sky. The man had suddenly felt lonely and he’d written to his wife. The stamp cost a thousand dollars. Some people had gone to New York; another visited a brother in Montana; my grandfather had sailed on the Atlantic Ocean; a family had migrated to Saskatchewan; and men went to cut timber in the forests of Maine or Abitibi. When these people came home in their new clothes, even the trees on the main street were a little envious of the travellers.
And there were those who had never gone away. Like old Herménégilde. He was so old he’d seen the first house being built in our village. He was old, but his mustache was still completely black. It was a huge mustache that hid his nose, his mouth and his chin. I can still see old Herménégilde’s mustache like a big black cloud over our village. Our parents used to say of him that he was healthy as a horse; all the storms of life had been unable to bend his upright, solid pride. At the end of his life he possessed nothing but a small frame house. All his children were gone. Old Herménégilde had spent his whole life without ever going outside the village limits. And he was very proud of having lived that way, rooted to the soil of our village. To indicate the full extent of his pride he would say:
‘I’ve lived my whole life and never needed strangers!’
Old Herménégilde had never gone running off to the distant forests, he had never gone to the neighbouring villages to buy or sell animals. He’d found his wife in the village. Old Herménégilde used to say:
‘The good Lord gave us everything we need to get by right here in our village! How come people have to go running off somewheres else where it ain’t no better?’
He recalled a proverb written by a very old French poet and repeated it in his own way: