I tell myself that if it weren’t for that fateful Sunday I brought Angèle to the mine, she wouldn’t have known how to get there. She’d still be alive today.
This conference is a one giant battle. I don’t know which is hardest, holding my rage in check or curbing the turmoil that is straining to break free. And then there is stoking the pleasure of watching them squirm in my presence. How can I want all this at the same time when nearby, our mother’s tired eyes keep making the rounds of her brood searching for a truth that escapes her?
It’s the second day of the conference. They will be presenting the Prospector Emeritus medal to our father in a few moments, and the ordeal will be over. I can go back to where I came from, back to sweet silence. Here, words are as sharp as rock. I’ve grown unaccustomed to conversations that riddle you with pointless words.
They have put us all in an anteroom adjoining the big room where the ceremony will take place. This is a surprise. No one ever mentioned us getting on stage with our father when they award the medal.
‘It’s too good to be true,’ the guy from the Prospectors Association explained. ‘It’s the first time one of our honorees has shown up with his whole family. It’s too good a chance to miss. Such a big family! It’s going to make a great photo.’
The guy has no idea of the hell he has condemned us to behind those closed doors.
For the sake of the photo and the perpetuity of their archives, we would just have to put up with our thoughts hurtling into one another. The room is not all that small. There is plenty of space for us to move among the chairs set out in no particular order, to get away from the beginnings of a conversation and the thick silences to one of the fake leather chairs taking on airs at the back of the room, and then to get up and pretend that we are contemplating the landscapes hanging on the wall or the thick pine forest through the picture windows running along the opposite wall. But time drags on, thoughts are screaming impatiently. When will they come to let us out of this room?
Our mother is the only one who manages to escape the torment. She is sitting quietly on a straight-backed chair in the centre of the room, and she is not moving an eyelash. It’s as if she is asleep. Her hands are clasped, lost in the folds of her dress, a horrible purple polka dot thing, no doubt the brainchild of the Old Maid, who is wearing the same colours. Her hair is done in a complicated chignon, and you can see her bare pink scalp under the fine furrows of grey hair. It’s hard to look at. She looks like a baby bird left out in the rain, practically naked under the thin threads of down plastered along its coarse-grained skin. From time to time, the chignon comes to life, moves left to right, right to left, and our mother looks blankly around the room. She is exhausted.
The Old Man is by her side. Or rather he is by the side of the pedestal ashtray, the only one in the room. He is chain-smoking. I don’t know whether it’s the ceremony or the ambient anxiety that is making him nervous.
Ever since the conference began, he hasn’t stopped saying that this medal is bullshit, a joke invented for canoe prospectors. He also calls them sightseers and day-trippers, and he can’t stand them. They are the prospectors who paddle daintily along lakes and rivers, shading their eyes with their hands, looking for a spot to pitch their tent for the night and prospect a little, in places they have already camped and prospected, in single file like ducks in a brood. The freshwater idle. Whereas he is a backcountry prospector.
‘Yes, but what exactly is the medal for?’
He has let his sons rib him for the past two days.
‘If it’s for the Norco deposit, you should tell them that a posthumous medal would have been just fine.’
We always held accolades in contempt, so now that we are all gathered for one of these shows of public vanity, we have to find an honourable way to distance ourselves from it.
Mocking and joking about the medal helps pass the time without stirring things up. There is no drama, no settling of accounts, no fuss, nothing but heavy silence and sidelong glances.
The medal would help us survive our thoughts. The jokes start again. Big Yellow cracks the first one.
‘Getting a medal is just the beginning. You have to find a place for it in your basement. You’ll have to tidy up your rock collection.’
‘You’ll have to frame it, build an altar to it, give it pride of place. That medal has been blessed by the president of the Prospectors Association himself.’
‘Let us kneel before the Prospector Emeritus. Ora pro nobis, miserere and tutti quanti. The mass has begun.’
The Old Man gives us a shy smile. He likes his sons’ swaggering insolence. He tries to answer in the same tone, but he doesn’t quite know how.
‘So will you tell us why they’re giving you this medal?’
A mischievous look flashes in his eyes and he says: ‘You may not believe me, but … it’s for having prospected a few feet away from luck.’
He knows that we criticize him when he isn’t there, affectionately perhaps, but still in an accusatory tone, of having a pickaxe that was more dreamer than diviner of riches. We don’t want nice clothes or other vanities any more than he does, but we would have liked to win now and again. We would have liked to have seen him come home from his claims at night and proudly announce that he had just discovered an incredible deposit. Instead, all he had to offer was his fatigue and hope for tomorrow. We used to say that he was prospecting a few feet away from luck. We didn’t think that he knew about it.
It is a quiet victory over his children’s insolence, and he savours it by smiling till wrinkles form around his eyes.
‘I prospected a few feet away from luck all my life,’ he says, smiling even wider. ‘It’s a lot truer than you think. All my life, aside from the Norco deposit, but that’s another story, all my life, I prospected where the vein started.’
Hearing the reedy singsong of our father’s voice is always an event in our lives. He says so little. His voice becomes animated only around mining people.
So, to hear him make a speech that looks like it is going to be long and full draws us toward him, in the centre of the room. Even me, who has avoided making possibly compromising contact during the conference, I leave my observation post in front of one of the windows and join the small crowd that has gathered around our parents. Magnum and Yahoo part to make room for me.
‘Yes, my whole life. Everyone knew. Word spread. Cardinal has a gift for finding the tail ends of veins, they said. They rushed to register claims next to mine at the Department of Mines. It wasn’t long before I would see them arrive with their devil’s gear.’
I can feel Geronimo’s angry breath on the back of my neck. He can’t bear the idea of someone taking advantage of our father. He is right behind me, and I feel him getting more agitated as the story unfolds.
‘They would set up on the edge of my claims, with all their prospecting paraphernalia. As for me, I would follow a clue I had found just by studying the land and imagining what it would be like underground. Nothing in my hands, everything in my head. And I had it, the vein! First, a little yellow line in a veinlet of quartz, two hundred feet farther, another outcrop, the fine line got wider, started to show glints of rainbow, chalcopyrite for sure, a copper deposit that was taking form, and I would follow it for weeks, using my shovel, my pickaxe and my dynamite, until the vein revealed itself, and I got to the limit of my claims, where those bastard gizmo prospectors were waiting for me so that they would know where to start their work.’
The gizmo prospectors are the ones who run around the woods with magnetometers, flowmeters, gravimeters and other modern inventions. Our father’s enemies. In the heyday of his anger, he called them gizmographers.
‘They stole all your discoveries from you?’
El Toro’s question stirs up an old hatred. It moves through our little crowd but doesn’t reach me. I have bigger grudges.
‘Stole is not the word they would use. They bought my claims. At a price that, well … ’
As
he explains the ins and outs of the transactions, I look at our mother, numb from fatigue on her ugly straight-backed chair, but still aware of what is going on around her. Watching her carefully, I notice that she reacts to our father’s words. She has an almost tender way of nodding her head at every point he makes.
He explains that they would pay him for the rights to his claims with shares in the mine, and that’s how he became a shareholder in all those companies that built assets from veins that he handed over to them. Some of them are extending the tentacles of their empire in South America and Africa.
‘The medal is a form of recognition,’ he says.
‘For having prospected a few feet away from luck,’ Pester adds, with a touch of bitterness.
Opinions are divided on what to think. Magnum, to my left, is excited to hear that our father has all that wealth within reach. Yahoo thinks he’s being had again. Émilien is just worried.
‘You still haven’t sold your shares?’
We understand from our father’s sardonic grin that those shares are private victories that he likes to savour in secret and so he has guarded them closely.
As for me, I have no opinion. I didn’t come here to talk about money.
Standing beside our mother, the Caboose follows the debate without taking his eyes off me. He has been under my feet since the beginning of the conference. He won’t stop hovering around me, wondering why I’m here. Poor Caboose. The poor kid was denied the truth and is running around in circles, getting tangled up in his questions.
I can sense, however, that he is coming to a decision. His eyes have stopped on something, an idea that emboldens him and prompts him to address me.
‘What about you, Angèle, what do you think?’
He is petrified by his daring. He doesn’t dare relax the twisted smile on his face.
The question bounces off the walls. No one wants it. No one wants to reveal the pain that is at the heart of the riddle, which is which?, because we are all worried about the same thing, our mother, our poor mother, sinking with the weight of her years on the straight-backed chair that is hurting her bones, and all of us here, we know who is who. Even the Caboose knows it. He keeps smiling to let us know that he knows. His question is a personal victory after years of being left out. Our mother is the only one who can be hurt by it.
Our mother is the one who speaks, in a thin, faltering voice. The room holds its breath.
‘Angèle died in the mine. The person you’re looking at is Carmelle. Tommy.’
The truth. Finally, the truth. Spoken, revealed, freed by the one person who was supposed to be protected from it, but who is giving it back to us. Oh, Angèle! It took so long for your right to live among us to be restored.
Our father takes our mother’s hand. He finds it in the folds of her dress and brings it to him, to his thigh, a slow, protective gesture. It’s the first time I have seen them united, looking like a couple.
She is no longer an old woman, half lethargic, sunk in a chair. She has presence, strength – a little wobbly on her fragile ramparts, but concentrating with all her might, determined not to let this moment of lucidity pass. Because she has more, we can feel it. She won’t leave us with the tenuous truth that she has just given us. She has something else to tell us. Her eyes, wide with effort, look around at her children, one by one, with her deep well of tenderness, like she used to do, and they stop at me.
‘Angèle died in the mine. You know that better than any of us, Carmelle. Tell us what you saw.’
How could I have been so stupid as to believe that I had escaped our mother’s eyes? She knows us better than we know ourselves. She knit us with the fibres of her soul and knows the stitch of our hearts like the back of her hand. She knew where I went to hide during your long absences, Angèle. She knew where my soul was when she came to the bedroom and saw me, eyes wide open in the night, my body vacant, and your smile full of wonder on my lips, from the happiness of seeing you living at the McDougalls’ or at the convent. So she was there, that day, close to me, and she witnessed me having that horrible vision.
The Old Maid was there too. How could I forget? She is a black stain on my memory.
She is going out of her mind. She knows what our mother is asking me to do, and she wants to stop the time machine that will take us back to that horrible Sunday in July. I see her begging me with panicked eyes, dilated in fear of the worst, as if the worst hadn’t already happened. No, I won’t do anything to stop what must be. All these years of living with the image of Angèle dying under an avalanche of rocks, all these years of dying under the crushing weight of silence, and you want what? For me to say nothing, to bend to your will, to invent a pretty lie to quiet everyone’s mind? No, you don’t reign over our consciences anymore. It’s time for the truth. You can’t wave the spectre of our mother writhing in pain and the family torn apart. There is nothing left at the end of your stick other than the shame of having let our sister die.
I have ten pairs of eyes, twenty pairs of eyes – I can’t count anymore – staring at me. They have gathered into a compact crowd and are waiting for me to speak.
I don’t know where to start. So many years have passed. The silence has been so thick.
Tootsie creeps up to our mother and loosens the sad chignon that stretches the skin of her face and hardens her features, freeing her hair into two white bundles that spread over her shoulders. Any more and it would have been as though she was going to get up from her chair, the gentle flutter of the nightgown rippling in the half-light of the bedroom, and come toward me, to bend over my dreams, and my soul would at last find some respite. And I address the words that I have held back for so many years to that gentle apparition in the night.
‘I saw her die, Mama. I saw it like I’m seeing you now. It wasn’t a vision. I wasn’t hallucinating. I was really transported to the mine, and I saw her, I felt her. I was there, beside her, inside her. I died with her.’
And I told the story. The shock wave of the first explosion, the house emptying, everyone running to the mine, and I’m there, upstairs, in the green bedroom, pressed against the wall, paralyzed in horror.
‘Angèle felt the shockwave travelling through the rock. Even before the roaring started and everything came crashing down on her, she felt the force of the explosion. And she couldn’t stop screaming. I screamed too when I heard her. I screamed my head off.
‘She was in the mine stope, near the central pillar, and she saw the roof of the mine open up above her. Very clearly, in almost pitch black, like a film in slow motion, she saw the rock split from one end to another, huge chunks of rock breaking off and starting to fall. In a split second, she saw the rough patches and sharp edges of each rock that was going to fall on her, and, at the end of a long tunnel, she saw the eye of death awaiting her.
‘I heard her bones break. I could smell her blood. I saw her heart, her lungs, her brains. But she wasn’t there anymore. She died before the first rock hit her.’
I saw her escape down the long tunnel where her soul took refuge, and I knew, I felt it with all my pain, that the tunnel was off limits to me. I screamed at her to come back to me, I screamed to break down the doors of death, to force death to give Angèle back, to take me to her.
‘She didn’t suffer? Are you sure?’
It is the tiniest consolation our mother is clinging to. She pulls herself toward the edge of her chair and waits for my answer to pluck her from the swirling waters of doubt.
‘I swear to you, Mama, Angèle didn’t suffer. She didn’t feel a thing. She died of fright. She died before the first rock hit her.’
I realize that I just called her Mama, a word that crept into our internal dialogues but never passed our lips. It was a word too laden with a sense of ownership to be uttered in a house like ours.
No one spots the gaffe. They are in shock, caught in a tangle of emotions, overwhelmed by a stream of images that come back to them in ways they couldn’t have expected.
; I am facing them, alone like always. From the teeming crowd of my brothers and sisters, pressed up against one other, not one of them holds out their hand to me. I am alone, and I won’t back down, I won’t be silenced. I’m being asked to speak, so I’ll tell the whole story, starting with the Old Maid’s grand scheme, the conspiracy she set in motion and that crushed us under the weight of a silence from which no one escaped unharmed – not even Geronimo, the very person we all wanted to shield from the hicks’ condemnation and from his own sense of justice. Look at him: doesn’t he look proud, our war hero? He is being eaten up by his memories. They’re burning him to his core. Look around you. Do you see what you’ve done? We all look like zombies. We’re all burning on the same fire. What was the point of forcing the silence on us?
‘The Old Maid was there, in front of me, in the green bedroom. I couldn’t see her. I was absorbed in the vision of Angèle under the dome of the mine stope, but I could hear her over the roar of the rocks. I heard her voice asking me, ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ and I heard my own voice saying to her, ‘Angèle … Angèle is in the mine. In the mine stope. Beside the central pillar … Noooooooo!’ The images swooped down on me. Up against the bedroom wall, I felt every rock that crashed down on Angèle in my flesh, and, with each one, I cried, ‘Run, Angèle!’ but where could she have gone, since she was already dead and there was nowhere to go? And when I felt her let herself be swept into a long tunnel with blinding light, I wanted to run after her. I wanted to rip myself from the wall that was holding me prisoner, and that’s when I saw the Old Maid, who was holding me with both hands and shaking me like a madwoman. She was screaming, ‘Will you shut up? Will you just shut up!’
‘You were coming unhinged. You should have seen yourself. You were hysterical. I couldn’t stand to see you that way.’
She is wrestling with herself. She is clinging desperately to her truth. She knows what’s coming. The woman is stubborn as a mule. She won’t give it up that easily. She believes that she acted for the good of the family. Well, look at it now, the Cardinal family, take a good, hard look and tell me if you see anything but our own damnation.
Twenty-One Cardinals Page 15