by Roch Carrier
Grandfather felled so many trees he was able to buy a farm. In his fields there were more rocks than earth. Grandfather took them away one by one, before he could plant. In the winter the frost would bring more rocks to the surface and every spring he would take up the struggle again. Then he planted. Grandfather didn’t swear like the other farmers; he smiled, because he was the strongest.
A few years later, Grandfather became a blacksmith. I’ve seen him fighting with the red-hot iron, I’ve seen him sweating, his face black, surrounded by sparks, battling with the iron — which he always succeeded in bending. He was the strongest. His strength was quiet, like the strength of a maple tree. I had spent so many days of my childhood with him that he no longer knew if I was his son or his grandson, but he always told me as he crushed my writer’s hand in his own enormous one:
‘That (he meant his strength), that’s something you don’t learn in books.’
His big hand would finally open to free my numb fingers and I said:
‘Being as strong as you are, you must be afraid of nothing.’
‘Fear’, Grandfather replied, ‘that’s something I’ve never known in my life.’
‘Him, not been afraid?’ my grandmother asked ironically, in one of her outbursts of laughter. ‘I can tell you, I remember when he was scared of Protestants.’
Grandfather got abruptly to his feet.
‘If I don’t put on some wood my fire’s gonna go out.’
And closing the door he grumbled:
‘Fear, that’s something I never knew.’
Grandmother took great pleasure in revealing Grandfather’s secret to me. She told me the story of Grandfather’s fear.
As a young girl, Grandmother had lived in Sainte-Claire. My Grandfather lived thirty miles away, in the mountains at Sainte-Justine. In order to visit his fiancée, Grandfather took a long road, winding with detours, hills and bumps. The mud lay thick on it. It climbed up hills, then came back down dangerously, avoiding stones and stumps. Between the two villages a few houses were grouped around a small church. Protestants lived in these houses. The small wooden church was a Protestant church. It was a Protestant village.
Grandfather, as strong as the forest, as strong as the rocks in the fields and as strong as iron, was never able to overcome his fear of passing through the Protestant village. As soon as he spotted it he would jump out of his carriage, seize the horse’s bridle and take a detour through the trees. When he’d passed the village he would get back on the road that led him to his fiancée.
Grandmother, who had just betrayed a secret, laughed like a schoolgirl suddenly grown old during the joke. I felt myself becoming sad.
Who, I wonder, could have planted such a great fear in the soul of a man who was so strong?
The Sorcerer
IN THE EVENING the bus came back from town. Sometimes it would stop and we’d watch a child from the village, as they used to say, who’d been away for a long time, get off with his suitcases and look around as though he had arrived in a foreign place.
The village was built on the side of a hill. Because of the difference in levels, we could lie in the grass on the slope and have our eyes at street level. Discreetly spreading the blades of grass, we could see without being seen. We could spy on life.
One evening the bus stopped in front of us. The powerful brakes gripped the steel of the wheels and made them shriek. The door opened and we saw shoes covered with grey spats on which broad striped trousers fell; the man placed his foot, in its spat, on the pavement and emerged from the shadows inside the bus. He was wearing a top hat like the magicians who came to put on shows. His coat with tails, as we called his jacket, came down to his calves. There was a white bow-tie around his neck and he carried a leather case like old Doctor Robitaille. The bus set off again. Only then did we notice that the man’s face was black.
Was he some practical joker who’d covered his face with black as we did the day before Lent to fool the grownups? We knew that Africa was full of Black people, we knew they had them in the United States and on the trains, but it wasn’t possible that a Black man had got on the bus and come to our village.
‘Either he isn’t a real nigger or he’s got the wrong village,’ I said to my friend Lapin, who was lying flat in the grass like a hunter watching his prey.
‘Look how white his teeth are; that’s the proof he’s a real nigger.’
Without moving his feet, his feet in their grey spats, the Black man looked up towards the top of the mountain, then down towards the bottom, contemplating for a moment. With his leather case, his jacket open to the wind, his black fingers pinching the brim of his top hat, he began to walk towards the top of the mountain. Lapin and I waited a bit before coming out of our hiding-place so we wouldn’t be seen. Then, from a distance, we followed the Black man. Other people were following him too, but they hid in their houses, behind curtains that closed after he’d gone by. A short distance from the place where he’d got off the bus was La Sandwich Royale, one of our two restaurants. The Black man stopped, looked up towards the top of the mountain, then down towards the bottom and, dragging his feet in their spats he went into La Sandwich Royale. A terrible cry rang out and already the wife of the owner of La Sandwich Royale was hopping onto the street, arms raised, in tears and squealing as loud as the butcher’s pigs.
‘She’s a woman’, Lapin explained, ‘it’s normal for her to be scared like that.’
‘A nigger in the missionaries’ magazine and a nigger you see right across from you isn’t the same thing.’
The frightened woman didn’t want to go back by herself to where the Black man was. Lapin and I had approached the window and our noses were pressed to the glass. The Black man was sitting at a table.
‘The nigger’s waiting’, Lapin noted.
Several people had come running at the sound of the panic-stricken woman’s cries. Pouce Pardu, who’d been in the war, in the Chaudiçre Regiment, had done everything a man can do in a lifetime. He said:
‘Me, I’m not afraid of Black men.’
He went inside. The grownups approached the window and, like Lapin and me, they saw Pouce Pardu come up to the Black man, talk to him, laugh, make the Black man smile, sit down with him, give him his hand. We saw the Black man hold the brave man’s hand for a long time, hold it open, bring it close to his eyes. The wife of the owner of La Sandwich Royale had stopped screaming but she was still trembling.
Through the window we’d seen Pouce Pardu take back his open hand and offer a banknote to the Black man. The owner’s wife was somewhat reassured, because she said:
‘I’ll go back inside if you’ll come with me.’
We went in, Lapin and I and the other little boys and the grownups who were looking in the window; Pouce Pardu announced:
‘That nigger can just look at your hand and tell your future and your past.’
‘Ask him what he wants to eat,’ said the wife of the owner of La Sandwich Royale.
Another former soldier, who’d fought the war in Newfoundland and who feared nothing either, said:
‘The future, I know: I ain’t got one. I’m going to ask the nigger to tell me my past.
We’d seen the Black man bend over the soldier’s open palm and whisper. After him, other people ventured to approach the Black man and later that evening cars came from the neighbouring villages, filled with people who’d come to see the Black man and who wanted to learn what lay in the future. Lapin and I no longer called him the Black man, but the Sorcerer. For only a sorcerer can know the future: a sorcerer or God. God, of course, wouldn’t be black …
The next day Lapin and I, crouching in the grass, saw the Black man reappear; we saw him come down from the mountain with his top hat, his spats and his jacket open to the wind. Lapin and I, flat against the ground, held our breath and watched the sorcerer pass: with his white teeth he was smiling like a true devil. So then Lapin and I had no need to talk to each other in order to understand. We took pebbles
from our pockets and threw them at him with all the strength of our small white arms.
Several years later I was in Montreal where I was wearing myself out trying to sell my first pieces of writing. One afternoon I was going to a newspaper to try to sell a story entitled ‘The Princess and the Fireman’, when I noticed, on the other side of the street, a Black man wearing a top hat and grey spats, striped trousers and a tailcoat. I hadn’t forgotten the Black man of my childhood. Running through the traffic, I crossed rue Sainte-Catherine. It was the Black man of my childhood, the one we’d thrown stones at because of his black skin, his unusual hat, his ridiculous spats, his strange knowledge; it was the same man, old now, bent over, his hat battered, his hair white, his spats soiled and his leather case worn thin. It was the same man! The white bow-tie was greyish now.
‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ I called out. ‘Will you read my hand?’ I asked as I caught up with him.
He put his case on the sidewalk, rested his back against the building. I held out my open hand. He didn’t look at me, but bent over to see the lines of my palm. After a minute of absorbed silence he said:
‘I can read that there’s something you’re sorry about.’
A Secret Lost in the Water
AFTER I started going to school my father scarcely talked any more. I was very intoxicated by the new game of spelling; my father had little skill for it (it was my mother who wrote our letters) and was convinced I was no longer interested in hearing him tell of his adventures during the long weeks when he was far away from the house.
One day, however, he said to me:
‘The time’s come to show you something’.
He asked me to follow him. I walked behind him, not talking, as we had got in the habit of doing. He stopped in the field before a clump of leafy bushes.
‘Those are called alders’, he said.
‘I know.’
‘You have to learn how to choose’, my father pointed out.
I didn’t understand. He touched each branch of the bush, one at a time, with religious care.
‘You have to choose one that’s very fine, a perfect one, like this.’
I looked; it seemed exactly like the others.
My father opened his pocket knife and cut the branch he’d selected with pious care. He stripped off the leaves and showed me the branch, which formed a perfect Y.
‘You see’, he said, ‘the branch has two arms. Now take one in each hand. And squeeze them.’
I did as he asked and took in each hand one fork of the Y, which was thinner than a pencil.
‘Close your eyes’, my father ordered, ‘and squeeze a little harder … Don’t open your eyes! Do you feel anything?’
‘The branch is moving!’ I exclaimed, astonished.
Beneath my clenched fingers the alder was wriggling like a small, frightened snake. My father saw that I was about to drop it.
‘Hang on to it!’
‘The branch is squirming’, I repeated. ‘And I hear something that sounds like a river!’
‘Open your eyes’, my father ordered.
‘I was stunned, as though he’d awakened me while I was dreaming.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked my father.
‘It means that underneath us, right here, there’s a little fresh-water spring. If we dig, we could drink from it. I’ve just taught you how to find a spring. It’s something my own father taught me. It isn’t something you learn in school. And it isn’t useless: a man can get along without writing and arithmetic, but he can never get along without water.’
Much later, I discovered that my father was famous in the region because of what the people called his ‘gift’: before digging a well they always consulted him; they would watch him prospecting the fields or the hills, eyes closed, hands clenched on the fork of an alder bough. Wherever my father stopped, they marked the ground; there they would dig; and from there water would gush forth.
Years passed; I went to other schools, saw other countries, I had children, I wrote some books and my poor father is lying in the earth where so many times he had found fresh water.
One day someone began to make a film about my village and its inhabitants, from whom I’ve stolen so many of the stories that I tell. With the film crew we went to see a farmer to capture the image of a sad man: his children didn’t want to receive the inheritance he’d spent his whole life preparing for them — the finest farm in the area. While the technicians were getting cameras and microphones ready the farmer put his arm around my shoulders, saying:
‘I knew your father well’,
‘Ah! I know. Everybody in the village knows each other… No one feels like an outsider’.
‘You know what’s under your feet?’
‘Hell?’ I asked, laughing.
‘Under your feet there’s a well. Before I dug I called in specialists from the Department of Agriculture; they did research, they analyzed shovelfuls of dirt; and they made a report where they said there wasn’t any water on my land. With the family, the animals, the crops, I need water. When I saw that those specialists hadn’t found any I thought of your father and I asked him to come over. He didn’t want to; I think he was pretty fed up with me because I’d asked those specialists instead of him. But finally he came; he went and cut off a little branch, then he walked around for a while with his eyes shut; he stopped, he listened to something we couldn’t hear and then he said to me: “Dig right here, there’s enough water to get your whole flock drunk and drown your specialists besides.” We dug and found water. Fine water that’s never heard of pollution.’
The film people were ready; they called to me to take my place.
‘I’m gonna show you something’, said the farmer, keeping me back. ‘You wait right here.’
He disappeared into a shack which he must have used to store things, then came back with a branch which he held out to me.
‘I never throw nothing away; I kept the alder branch your father cut to find my water. I don’t understand, it hasn’t dried out.’
Moved as I touched the branch, kept out of I don’t know what sense of piety — and which really wasn’t dry — I had the feeling that my father was watching me over my shoulder; I closed my eyes and, standing above the spring my father had discovered, I waited for the branch to writhe, I hoped the sound of gushing water would rise to my ears.
The alder stayed motionless in my hands and the water beneath the earth refused to sing.
Somewhere along the roads I’d taken since the village of my childhood I had forgotten my father’s knowledge.
‘Don’t feel sorry’, said the man, thinking no doubt of his farm and his childhood; ‘nowadays fathers can’t pass on anything to the next generation.’
And he took the alder branch from my hands.