Black Bird (30 page)

It was set during the Rebellion, and began: “In a town where even the nuns are grey, where coal is still burnt against the cruelties of January and the winter holidays are the important ones, I was born at the beginning of summer. The midwife led the women of the house in assisting my mother, while my father was in the basement attending to his secret occupation as an abortionist …”

But he was having trouble keeping things realistic. Occasionally a disruption would occur, and the character he’d made an elderly patriarch would suddenly
turn into the pirate Hook or Bluebeard, or later show up in the story as a Cyclops:

“He dominated us all with his cruel laugh and physical unpredictability, as if having only one eye had kept his personality from rounding itself to the fullest …”

And yet only two pages later: “His constant silence, coupled with the accusatory look of the single immense eye in the middle of his aged forehead, loomed over us relentlessly as the summer sun …”

He’d thought he wanted to be Kundera or Calvino, but discovered himself some odd hybrid of Lautréamont and Clark Ashton Smith. In order to keep himself more reined in, he gave himself the task of writing up descriptions of his characters as if they were members of his own family, and produced portraits of them he could refer to in his story.

Of Aline he wrote: “Her hair is limp and dull against her pale neck. She is nervous, always moving, never at rest. She crosses herself and holds the crucifix that hangs on her neck. She speaks a common but prim French, so that a language I always think of as languorous and eloquent seems pinched and sharp. She’s small.”

Uncle and Father became neighbours, “ineffectual twins, neither with any apparent occupation, who nevertheless seemed to divide the day into equal shifts, for one was never seen during the day, the other never after dark. But they were easily distinguished, because one was a drunk and the other was missing some fingers.”

His sister became the wife of a Patriote, and the drive behind her husband’s dedication, herself handing him a cleaned and ready musket, or passing messages back and forth with other wives. He’d already written in a scene at the climax where Marie, now widowed, becomes a prime agitator in the riots that burn down Canada’s first parliament buildings in Old Montreal.

He couldn’t seem to find himself a place among them, either as the runt or the prodigal, until he fell on the idea of a young defrocked Jesuit making a little noise at the Literary Society on account of some licentious poems in the manner of Nerval or Baudelaire.

It was difficult keeping all these elements working together, because he had to figure them out as he went along, and his mind kept changing about what they meant or which character they were about, and he spent hours in silent contemplation until some other prisoner made a noise or commotion in some other part of the block, bringing him back to the real world of his stinking jail cell with a start.

He looked over his scattered paragraphs and could think of no way to arrange them all together in a sensible manner that wouldn’t contradict what he’d read in the musty
History of Canada
the prison possessed. He went back to the library and looked more closely at the Canadian writers he found, and then threw away his original opening, replacing it instead with pages of description before even bringing a character into the scene, let alone having an actual event happen.
Once he’d done this, he recognized it as an odd recapitulation of the early English novel, where a title character begins by explaining his lineage back several generations. But being transposed to the colonies, characters who couldn’t claim a pedigree were validated by family lands instead, by their real physical presence in a landscape of material objects and forces, not a milieu of social rank and grace, or lack of it.

It was easier when he could sit again. He had finally hit his stride; he’d become familiar enough with the daily routine of prison life that he simply fulfilled his given role when necessary and spent most of his time on his bunk, either staring blankly up at the sky through the bars or scribbling madly in his notebooks. And now it was finally the end of October and he was being released.

Now what Marie needed was a gravedigger. Did she dare ask help from Grandfather or Uncle, both so experienced in that line? Could she go to Father with this problem as she had with her pregnancy? Did she have any option but to try shoving this skeleton into its closet? Of course not. One way or another, Cross must be disposed of without arousing the authorities. It wasn’t just for herself: even an ordinary murder would have destroyed all their lives, the investigation revealing their secrets large and small—from their theft of electricity and gas from neighbours, and the ghoulish profession of Grandfather
and Uncle, to the body of a foreign diplomat and her clear connection to the bombings and robberies of the FLQ.

Yet the worst of it would be the family’s—Father’s—knowledge of what she’d done—the terrorism that slowly mounted from political scare tactics to the murder of one of their own family, Angus, and finally into the creation of an international incident. In their own home, no less. She lowered her face into her dirty hands and sobbed. She couldn’t bear the shame of Father finding out. She imagined the complex mix of disappointment, fear, anger and hopelessness the knowledge would cause him, and she felt all those things herself.

Under the bare bulb of the hiding place, with John Cross sprawled unnaturally on the floor, she sobbed over the corpse as parents do over the bodies of their own children.

She was alone. No one could help her in this. And this was a problem which could only be buried. With Grandfather’s spade she began to dig into the earthen floor of the hidden room in the basement. It was long and hard work. She kept having to brush tears away from her cheeks, and so smeared earth and blood from her hands over her face. And she was unused to handling the spade, and blisters formed on her palms alongside the gashes—blisters where Grandfather and Uncle had grey, dead calluses on theirs.

Angus was frustrated. Without a body, he was tossed about on the winds like a cloud of dust, and felt sometimes his motes gather close enough to resolve into wakefulness, and other times as if much of himself had been swept away and lost in the ether forever. Or was this just another dream of Mother’s? Was he truly still anywhere at all? Or just in her unconscious and unrestrained head?

The heat was like a desert, and the mass of blinding dust was a storm that was partly himself and partly simple patterns of air moving across rippling dunes. He was a mirage of himself, lost in the infinite particles swirling in forces he couldn’t resist.

Yet there she lay, asleep, and that bothered him so: Wake up, daughter! Wake up! You’ve got your life to lead, you’ve got your family.

You’ve still got your own body, damn it, and why don’t you use it? Oh, God, for a body to rest in—yes, rest in: all this flying apart in circles and clouds makes me nauseous. And falling in piles of dust on other, scorched deserts of dust—no water, no rest, no will of my own any more—and you just lie there, with a perfectly good body, you can get up and turn the thermostat down—it’s killing me, but I can’t be killed, just desiccated and floating on currents of warmer and warmer air.

Oh, God, for a body to speak with, to wake my daughter with, to live and die with …

Meanwhile, in the parlour, Mother’s friends took the opportunity of seeming concerned for their
still-slumbering friend to abandon their own homes and save the expense of handing out candy. Since they had little to say on their own behalf, they spent some hours gnawing the trivia of neighbourhood gossip, and then lamenting worldly affairs.

As far as Mrs. Pangloss was concerned, the troubles all began on July 11, 1969. One giant leap indeed. That single event could account for all the noxious prodigies plaguing the world at large: the unpredictable raging of the weather, Angus’s horrible demise, Grandfather’s just deserts, Jean-Baptiste’s success-cum-notoriety, Mother’s persistent somnolence, Frère André’s missing heart, and up to and including the kidnapping of the British trade minister by those horrible criminals (what—pray tell, what?—would the rest of the world and Mother England think now of their once faithful, proud Dominion?); not to mention Mr. Pangloss’s creeping impotence.

Mrs. Harrison quietly cackled in sympathy, with a teacup held under her chin.

As a matter of fact, according to Mrs. Pangloss, all these disasters had clear forewarnings, if only proud, ignorant men had heeded the signs. It was the simplest process to trace back through history the calamities brought about by each aeronautic advance. Every one of these scientific achievements, Mrs. Pangloss averred, was a correlate of moral decline, tied in inverse proportion to the others. Had not jets occasioned a flurry of hijackings, and the opening of the hungry maw that was the Bermuda Triangle? Were
not propeller planes and rockets the direct cause of the London Blitz and Germany’s unfortunate craze for Hitler? Even the age of dirigibles had eaten itself, vis-à-vis the “unsinkable”
Titanic
, which left its mark even in Montreal’s own Mount Royal and Côte-des-Neiges cemeteries, and ended with what is always referred to as the
Hindenburg
Disaster; oh, the humanity.

Certainly, and with pride, had
she
been a peasant farmer in France (though perish the thought: herself a dirty, garlic-eating frog!) she, too, would have pitchforked a Montgolfier for a Satanist, or worse. There’s no denying the wisdom of the folk, even if hygiene isn’t a priority in the culture. She’d always said, you can’t blame people for what they are; it was God’s own business to reveal His wisdom as He saw fit, and if the Lord Himself was content that some of His creatures couldn’t speak proper English or wash the fields out of their hair before sitting down to dinner, who was she to question the Lord? Though really, bombings and kidnappings were going a bit far; that’s just taking advantage, and surely not what the Lord intended, no matter how twisted the thinking He put into someone’s head. Let it be said again, as it was said in the beginning (and hope, at last, mere foolish mortals might listen): Man Was Not Meant To Fly, Icarus.

Imagine: herself arrested in an FLQ sweep, and her husband dragged from his work to bail her out. They ought all to be rounded up and shot, or deported. Bombings and kidnappings and God only knows what else …

And Mother still lying there like a corpse.

Mrs. McCairn clucked more than once and shook her head, either in complete sympathy, or just possibly without the will to argue, resignedly.

When the doorbell rang again, Mrs. Harrison jumped and sent ashes scattering over herself, and Aline hurried down the hall from the kitchen with Grace following her in the air and landing on her shoulder.

It was delightfully nostalgic for Aline. In her own neighbourhood, her mother wasn’t the only adult to dress the part when handing out treats. It was a creepy delight for the children who stood on the threshold, surprised to find the staid, controlling, ordinary grown-ups decked out in black and masks and darkness. The reversal of roles threw the younger ones into a confusion of identity. After all, the children knew they were only playing at being ghosts and ghouls and grave robbers; but adults most definitely did not play at dress-up. Adults were the forces of stability themselves, the agents of comfort and security. So who
were
these people answering the knock on a neighbour’s door, and just where were the neighbours? Could these life-sized, lifelike evil spirits be real? Could they have done away with the ordinary, familiar grown-ups who lived here? Were their neighbours bewitched or scared away, or worse—buried in the basement?

Aline, dressed in mourning, with her dark lace shawl still smelling of mothballs and a great, cawing, curious raven staring down from her shoulder,
opened her mouth and let out her best impression of Mrs. Harrison: she cackled with glee.

“Viens t’en, mes petites. Come in, come in, my pretties. Hee hee hee hee, have some candies!” And she doled out chocolate kisses and toffees and sugar candies. And for the smallest, most adorable pastel fairy princess she reached into her bag and brought forth a large, shining red apple, and knelt down before the child. She was trembling before the giant, sinister witch and her familiar, wanting to bolt, but petrified right where she was.

Aline was having too much fun to notice the child’s fear. “Now, my little precious,” she said, “take this apple home with you, it will put a rosy blush on your cheeks—but beware! You dare not eat this before going to bed—for apples will give you a tummy ache and you won’t … get … any … sleep!” And she thrust the apple into the little girl’s bag.

Suddenly, to Aline’s surprise, the fairy princess burst out crying, and all the now terrified goblins and monsters scattered from the porch, down the stairs and up the street as quickly as they could—some dropping or even abandoning their treasured sweets as they ran.

All except the Frankenstein, who stopped to gather spilt candy into his mouth, and Moonie, whose mother was sipping tea with the ladies in the parlour.