by Steve Weiner
‘Leave me alone!’ he said. ‘Lâche-moé donc, you shit!’
Roger put on tight jeans like the Winnipeg Dew Droppers. He slicked his hair back on both sides: a duck’s ass. He was very skinny. With his freckles, big ears, and a lopsided grin he looked like a dangerous clown. Roger and I walked the wharf at midnight. He taped a flashlight to the barrel of his .22. A rat stood in Roger’s beam, Roger blew its brains out.
New waterfowl had come to Lake Superior: the crested northern egret, swan-tailed goose, birds we had never seen.
‘Salt intrusion,’ Roger spat. ‘Eisenhower’s engineers are killing the St Lawrence.’
Roger and I drank crème de menthe. We toured the old warehouses. There were trap doors, a discarded cane, pipes, welding flux, a sewing-machine wheel, ginseng jars, half an oboe, figurines of Bavarian peasants carrying faggots of twigs. We found a segmented goldfish with red glass eyes. When our mines had been working Chinese were ferried across the Great Lakes. Now, in October, the city electricity was low. Fog lit by the harbour crawled up the roofs. Roger’s head was surrounded in a blaze, cradled in orange cloud.
‘Kiss me, Jean.’
I kissed Roger.
‘On the mouth.’
I did so.
The fog flickered with St Croix’s neon downtown. Low clouds rolled on the harbour. A freighter churned to Rutherford.
‘You have made me tremble,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘With your little wolf teeth.’
‘My hot tongue.’
Roger kissed me passionately. I lost my balance and slammed against the rough green door.
‘Well, all right,’ I said.
The lighthouse beam hit the warehouse roof and shot over the black water. I became light and flew where there is no Canada, no lampreys, no priests.
Father Ybert brought an engraving of John Calvin to religion class, The Branded Sodomite. I sat with Roger. Calvin stood naked in a bath with a married woman and her young son.
‘Calvin ordered the murder of five hundred Catholic children,’ Father Ybert lectured. ‘He was an infamous lecher. He escaped into a monastery and infected thirteen nuns with venereal disease. He died under the lily, sign of the sodomist.’
Etienne Bastide sent me a present:
a lily.
I visited Uncle Artur.
Artur was a taxidermist at the Blue Gill Bait and Tackle Shop on Long Sturgeon Street. Artur sat at his rack of knives and scissors. He had cutting pliers, flat-nosed pliers, camel-hair brushes and stuffing iron. Spools of black threads, arsenic soap, vials of potash bichromate, soda sulphate, burnt alum lay on his desk. His nails were black and brittle.
‘You are drinking crème de menthe?’ he asked.
‘I am.’
‘And running with Roger Vaucaire?’
‘I am.’
‘What does your mother think?’
‘She cries.’
He took a dead St Mary hawk, cracked both wings close to the body and sliced each wing. He cut through and the skin separated. He skinned the stomach to the tail. The body fell off. Artur worked the eyes out and extracted the brains. He constructed a false body: wire pinned to the skin. He inserted cotton wadding, sewed up the hawk, and put in agate eyes.
‘Stupid,’ he finally said. ‘Maudit niaiseux. Really, dirty stupid.’
He stared at me.
‘O mon pauvre Jean,’ he said. ‘Si tu savas tout le trouble pis toutes les larmes. Eh? If you knew all the trouble and all the tears.’
Artur turned away. He took up the hawk, admired it, and set it on a resined branch. He splayed pine boughs under, put a stuffed mouse in the talons to make it fierce.
‘Who will reassemble you?’ he asked.
Gregors Illuskvi, the Ukrainian prison guard, committed a perversion on his blind son Peders.
My father cut two holes in a gunny sack, slipped it over his head, and made a torch of lilac roots and tar. Georges, Emil, Artur and he went to the Arrondissement des Pauvres. Freddie Granbouche came. Herman Hartmann brought a rifle. Gilbert Young, Hank Genycki and Marc Auberlin came from Isle of May Street. My father pounded on Illuskvi’s trailer door.
‘ILLUSKVI!’
My father broke Illuskvi’s windows with a crowbar. Georges forced the lock. The Verhaerens yanked Illuskvi into the yard, stripped him, and tied the torch to his rear.
My mother, Zena Courennes, Old Woman Dyb, ran into the compound whirling noise-makers, wearing thick sweaters, pants under their skirts. Their faces were smeared black with coal.
‘Sodomite, sodomite
Void voir le sodomite.’
The Verhaerens dumped Illuskvi in a red wagon, lit the torch, and rumbled him down Emilia Street. Bits of burning lilac root dripped on to Illuskvi’s bare rear.
‘Jack – ‘Illuskvi screamed. ‘Don’t kill me!’
‘Snitch!’
‘You didn’t slap Barrault! You slapped nobody!’
‘Damn right!’
Herman Hartmann shot his rifle. He poured flour on Illuskvi’s back and Georges mixed it in with vegetable oil. They poured feathers on Illuskvi.
‘Sodomite, sodomite
Voici voir le sodomite.’
They rumbled Illuskvi up Fourth Street, past the French quarter, back to his trailer. My father chased him inside and, when Illuskvi wouldn’t come out, unblocked the trailer’s wheels. It rolled down and crashed into the oaks.
Everybody went home. My father, still excited, sweated and breathed hard. He washed his face in the kitchen. He drank, cupping his palm under the stream.
‘You were wonderful, Papa!’ I shouted.
‘Nothing. It was nothing.’
He bathed his squat, powerful arms with the kitchen sponge. He danced in glee.
‘Illuskvi pissed!’ he squealed. ‘Did you see that? Squirted like a poodle!’
‘Then he would have burned faster.’
‘Eh?’
‘Having less water in him!’
‘Ha ha! A good one, that, Jean! Ha ha!’
My father uncapped two bottles of Export. My mother came into the kitchen, also sweating, still wearing her sweater and pants. She nuzzled his cheek. Suddenly she looked at me.
‘Michel,’ she said. ‘Some day this will happen to you.’
On 24 November 1954, my dearest friend Roger Vaucaire fell into the Parsons turbine at the trunk-line rotating platform and was slashed to death. Ankles, thighs, forearms, shoulders, were chopped up.
I plucked roses for him at the cimetière. Suddenly thunder shook the tombs.
‘Jean – !’
I looked up.
Rainbows of Roger arched over St Croix, bleeding through the season’s first snow on to whitening fields.
Seven
St Croix froze.
Islands were lost in white and grey fog. The sun was gone. Vacant lots turned to Jutlands of ice. My mother practised her ice-skating. Red pom-poms, red skirt, swirled in the rink. In Swallowfield the prisoners huddled in their cells. Children on the bluffs fought the Plains of Abraham. Lake Superior turned to an angry mood: black water, arms of snow, vapour where ships disappeared.
Slowly the Arctic front moved in.
Nights fell like deep sleep. Badgers slept the narcosis of winter. A cow wandered La Poudre Road and died bewildered on its feet. It was the coldest Christmas on record. Antifreeze failed. DeSotos rusted and came apart on the lake. Father Leszek, Father Vigneau and Father Pic put on black Russian hats and rang bells for Crow Hill orphanage. When headlights moved through the snow, streets sparkled and black figures darted across the ice.
Snow fell in the schoolyard, on the trunk-line station, the Portobello Hotel, the vaults in the cimetière. Snow fell in the closed Galtieau yard. There was nowhere the snow did not fall, on Ojibway Flats, from the tundra to the islands.
Our faces were pink, mauve, green at store windows. Electric vacuum cleaners, radios and high-fidelity phonographs suddenly appeared in Prange’s windows. It was
Canadian Family Week. Mechanical dolls sang in front of posters of wives serving canapés to husbands. My mother bought sweaters, knives, a saucepan. Chansonniers came from Quebec. Bad news: Emilia Dionne, the quintuplet, died in a Quebec convent.
The Edmonton Eskimos won the Grey Cup. The greatest team Montreal ever had, and yet they lost, 26 to 25. How do such things happen? Suddenly the Holy Father, Pius XII, collapsed. He recovered, but he was not the same. No, not the same man. We began to realize that not even Maurice Richard could save us now.
My father lost his job.
We moved to an abandoned motel on Abattoir Road. It was a low, grey building. The flag pole still rattled in the courtyard. The electric sign had been removed but the grey poles remained. An outdoor privy was connected to our room by a long corroded yellow ramp. I slept on a cot in the ramp.
My father became concerned about his bad luck. Periodically he stood on one foot, twisted his neck to the nearest window, and slowly clapped his hands three times, producing three slow, deep slaps.
‘One reason I am unemployed,’ he told me, ‘why I am under suspicion, is that, simply, I have better ideas.’
He slumped on the edge of the bed. I went through a variety of postures, trying to cheer him, splaying my fingers over his head, jerking my knee toward his. It was no use.
‘We are au chômage,’ my father said, trying to smile. ‘On the dole. Barrault’s revenge.’
‘It’s bad,’ I agreed.
‘Maybe we should go to St Iglesias, Minnesota. Or Bunco, Louisiana. We have relations there.’
But he didn’t believe it. The material world had failed us. He smiled bitterly.
‘It is mont-de-piété for us,’ he said. ‘Bread of charity.’
‘Father, you became a stone in the balls.’
My father became depressed and went hunting in la forêt. When he came back Herbert and Ronnie Krems, my mother’s brothers, waited for him.
‘Jack,’ Herbert said. ‘We are told you are jobless.’
‘I have enemies.’
‘Ignace labours at the seminary,’ Herbert said.
‘You have not lived up to your responsibilities,’ Ronnie said.
‘These are the lies they spread.’
‘Ignace is peculiar. Jean-Michel is feminine.’
‘Le bon Dieu made them that way.’
Herbert and Ronnie exhaled cigar smoke into my father’s face. They backed him against the wall.
‘It is now illegal to cause children to require psychiatric assistance,’ Herbert said.
‘It didn’t use to be that way.’
Ronnie took him outside and slammed him against the motel’s grey door.
‘Hasn’t Jean-Michel spoken of suicide?’ he asked.
‘He succeeds at nothing.’
Herbert pushed him to the edge of the porch.
‘Ignace cries on the bus to Winnipeg. For no reason.’
‘He has plenty reason.’
My mother sat by the fold-out couch. Light surrounded her pretty black hair, her golden bracelet that dangled. Pippi slept in her slipper. She painted by the numbers, a Bavarian chapel by a water wheel, gold, russet, dipping her brush into capsules of paint. Ronnie slapped my father outside.
‘She mourns. She grieves. She works herself to the bone,’ Ronnie said. ‘While you take sweats in la forêt!’
‘Is personal hygiene illegal?’
Herbert and Ronnie Krems threw my father off the porch. He lay there and they rubbed snow in his mouth.
‘It is no laughing matter, Happy Jack.’
‘I am not laughing.’
‘You are in grave difficulties.’
‘Yes. The grave. You’re right.’
‘You know what we can do to you.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Be a man, Jack Verhaeren,’ Ronnie said. ‘Be good to your children. Tuez-vous pour eux autres. Kill yourself for them.’
‘Yes. Kill.’
Ronnie and Herbert Krems trudged away. Their black galoshes made trails in the snow. Our father crept back in, scraped the dishes, took out the garbage, took Pippi out, shovelled the driveway. My mother went into the shower and sang sweetly until the hot water ran out.
Uncle Georges died.
It was a freak. He was stepping out of his trawler when a sudden swell pushed the gangplank and he pitched off. A dock post fell and struck his head. My father and I ran to his shack. Georges leaned against his Korean wife, Annie, who suckled him. Children and dogs ran around the bed.
‘Le bon Dieu has struck my enemy,’ my father said.
‘I am not your enemy,’ Georges wheezed.
‘Why didn’t you tell me my wife was crazy?’
Georges’s face turned the colour of dirty underwear. My father put his head on Georges’s chest. Georges suddenly hauled down the curtains in agony. My father threw him back on to the bed. I marched around banging pans.
‘I ORDER YOU OUT!’ my father yelled. ‘OUT, MAUVAIS DIEU!’
Georges screamed. My father sweated terribly. Georges leaned over and vomited.
‘Jesus, he’s a tough fucker,’ Georges muttered.
‘Y va mourir,’ Annie said, lighting her pipe. ‘He’s going to die.’
‘LE BON DIEU – SAVE THIS FRENCHMAN!’ my father screamed.
‘Yé en train de mourir,’ she said. ‘He’s dying.’
Georges stopped breathing. Annie knocked the ash from her pipe.
‘Yé mort,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’
Annie covered him with a blanket. We crossed ourselves. My father and I stepped on to the porch. We were dizzy. St Croix was barely visible: three lights on the dark lake. Fog glided by. My father pulled me under his jacket and held my head.
‘That’s what it is to be human,’ he said. ‘Sadness. Lots of sadness. Just when you can’t take it any more le bon Dieu gives you, for the hell of it, just a little more sadness.’
Gruel, Oberlander and Semml signed depositions that my father had stripped Barrault and sent him into the rain.
My father wore his black coat and went to his hearing. It was held in the second floor of the police building, an airless grey room. They read his dossier to him.
‘French-speaking. Sixth-grade graduate. Merchant Marine. Dismissed. Emotional instability. HM Prison Swallowfield probationary employment to June 1947. Prison guard third class to present. Works long hours. One count alcohol on duty, April 1950 – ’
‘It was Tomczek’s vodka,’ my father said.
‘Be quiet.’
‘With pleasure, mon supérieur.’
‘Severe beating administered to prisoner Gillesfons, November 1951 -’
‘Never did a man deserve it so much.’
‘Verhaeren.’
‘Indeed, monsieur. I am quiet.’
‘Application for promotion denied December 1951.’
‘See?’ my father said. ‘A good dossier.’
The judge put the dossier on the varnished table.
‘Verhaeren,’ he said. ‘This is not a good report. It is a veritable cahier de doléance.’
‘Yes. It is abominable.’
‘Gruel and Oberlander, for example, have three citations for exemplary duty.’
‘Well, they know where to put their tongues.’
‘Verhaeren?’
My father rose from his chair.
‘This is a farce!’ he said. ‘I sent the Negro into the rain because he disobeyed me!’
‘Yes, but – naked – ?’
‘The Negro has dark skin. It keeps him warm.’
‘Verhaeren. The man is nearly dead.’
‘His skin failed.’
My father, red-faced, lit his pipe, but it sputtered. The judge leaned forward confidentially.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they hooked you up, Verhaeren,’ the judge said.
‘Hooked me up?’
The judge put a forefinger to his temple and crossed his eyes.
‘Pzzzzzt!’
Prisoners were leased to the city as road crews. Poles, Yugoslavs and Germans stood in the frozen mud. They threw remnants of the Portobello Hotel’s porch on to flatbed trucks. Albanians, Hungarians and Romanians cleared timbers from the banks of the Petit Croix. My father drove by and they threw frozen dog turds.
‘Yah! Yah! Verhaeren!’ they yelled.
Our lives were blind, instinctive, Catholic. We were miners with no lanterns. We danced in our city of the dead and thanked le bon Dieu for our graves.
I heard my parents.
‘Yvonne!’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘I am under tension.’
‘You thought I was an easy lay, a stupid girl from the convent!’ she said.
‘You are stupid. You were an easy lay.’
‘Maudit foureur,’ she said. ‘Stupid fucker.’
‘I refute that!’
‘You do?’
‘Yes!’
‘How do you refute that?’
‘Thus do I refute that!’
Our father stuck two fingers down his throat, leaned forward, and vomited.
In the morning Ignace played at the vomit. It had turned dry and satiny, like a rock crystal garden, with silver threads and golden speckles.
* * *
St Bonaventure rose pink at dawn. Black crows circled the town. Girls walked over the street grit. I heard Antoinette Hartmann and Claire Pic, echoes, ice breaking under their boots. They giggled far, far away …
Erland Szegy, the mortician’s son, joined the buveurs. Erland was short, with brown deer’s eyes. We blindfolded him by the prison, forced Lamonts down his throat, twirled him, and suddenly showed him the artifice of Canadian Ufe. We asked his story.
‘When people die,’ Erland said, ‘my father embalms them. Their corpses are taken to the cemetery, sure, but afterwards we dig them up and take them to the lake. The priests throw flowers, and a submarine takes the corpses past the lighthouse.’
‘That is not the truth of the submarine,’ Etienne objected.
I slapped the table.
‘You do not have the Deadwood whip, Bastide. Silence. Continue, Szegy.’
Erland smiled prettily.