Black Bird (32 page)

“Who the hell is he?”

“Why didn’t you take care with the shovel?”

“Why didn’t you do a decent job with the soldering?”

“What’re we going to tell the cops?”

“Aline, the house is on fire. You have to get out.”

“Forget her. Let her die. I’m getting out.”

“For God’s sake, someone help me with Mother.”

Who is this person lying with a head split open? And look, great seams along his chest, his arms, everywhere. But nothing, no person in there.

There was a disturbance in the house, but more than that was unclear. Was this person responsible? He collected himself and moved closer. He drifted down against the warmth that pushed back at him, and still, there was no one in there. Repulsive. What
an ugly, beaten monster. But when he got close enough, there was a thrumming, a pulsing that welcomed him. He offered no resistance. He settled in through the sutures and the gaps in the flesh, and he began to feel. His chest rose slowly, contentedly. Everything else hurt, hurt like hell, but his chest drew in air—air!—and he felt a kind of release of tension, as if some ordeal were over, and he was once again welcomed and loved.

He slept.

He woke to the sound of strident cawing. He might have been dreaming of vultures.

Hot. Why is it always so bloody hot? Red, orange flames, dark black smoke—what have I done? What did I do or not do? To be here, enduring this? I did what they told me to. I kept my nose clean, I didn’t cause trouble—is this my reward? Bodiless, in hell?

But those are my things burning—and I’m lying on stairs—fuck, my head hurts—my back—my chest—

He gasped the air, and then realized he’d done it. He looked around. Everything hurt. A jet of flame sprang from the wall and everything was catching fire. He struggled to rise, but had trouble with his legs and arms—

—these are not my legs and arms—

He crawled up the stairs. Black smoke billowed out the doorway into the hall. He crawled out of it coughing, raised himself on the door, took huge gasps of cleaner air.

This was his daughter’s house. He staggered down the hall and held himself up on the parlour
door frame. There was screaming and thumping coming from upstairs. His daughter lay sleeping on a hospital bed. He slowly put one mismatched foot in front of the other and swayed unevenly, flailing his arms out to balance. Behind him he heard someone running down the stairs. He reached the bedside and steadied himself with both arms locked, and looked down at his sleeping daughter’s profile. Behind the sagging lines of middle age he saw the bright eyes and curiosity of the girl she had been. He saw his long-dead wife’s chin and smile, saw his own nose, saw her in her wedding gown, saw her in the hospital bed with a newborn in each arm.

Behind him he heard, “Jesus Christ.”

“Wake up,” he said to his daughter. Nothing. “Wake up. Wake up!” Nothing. He reached over to her ear, drew in his breath and yelled, “Wake up!”

Just as Father grabbed him by the neck, Mother’s eyes fluttered. “Wake up,” he croaked.

She opened her eyes.

And screamed.

Father yanked so hard the head came off in his hands. He yelled and dropped it. Mother scrambled from the bed, and the body fell where she had lain.

He was dead. Finally.

Aline was so depressed she convinced herself they were only playing some horrible Halloween gag on her. But Grace was agitated, shrieking and flying about, fluttering at the window. Aline got up to open
it. Even though they’d abandoned their pounding and screaming at her door, it sounded like they were doing just the same elsewhere in the house.

When she had the window open, and Grace had darted out into the cold night air, she realized she could hear the sirens of fire trucks screaming towards her.

My God, had they been serious? She hurried to the bedroom door and flung it open. A wall of flame came rushing up the hallway towards the air pouring in from her window. She retreated. It really was a fire. How could things continue to get so much worse? Wasn’t there ever an end to the suffering?

She had no choice now but to go out the window, just as Grace had. She stepped onto the roof of the kitchen and saw flames licking over the lip from the windows below. The roof was hot on her bare feet. There were no stairs or ladder to the ground, which seemed infinitely far below. Behind her the top floor of the house was engulfed. In minutes the roof would collapse beneath her.

Grace flapped in her face, cawing. She beat the bird away, but it came back, flying around her in ever-widening circles, calling. Aline was confused. “Grace, go away, we’ll both die.”

The bird herded her to the edge of the roof. Across the lane the church was dark and lifeless. Aline couldn’t bring herself to jump: it was too far across to any other building or down to the ground. She’d always been timid. She turned and ran to the other edge. The church was behind her and she faced the
flank of the mountain. The illuminated cross glowed out of the darkness. Grace flittered about her face again, and Aline staggered, almost went over.

She was frightened. Grace screeched, almost hovering in front of her, over the empty air. “Oh, Grace,” she said.

The bird called out to her as she had during their singing lessons, with the notes and strains of the tune they’d worked out together. Aline turned and saw, on one side, a wall of flame advancing towards her from the rear of the building, and on the other, the coloured glass of the church windows flickering dimly in the shadows. There were angels circling in the air, leading the risen one up, in a scene of the Ascension.

She had always wanted to fly. She sang with Grace. She had to raise her voice to hear herself above the cracking timbers, and the wind and fire howling back and forth at each other. She felt the tar of the roof go soft under her feet, heard the groaning and snapping of beams giving way. Jump? She could no longer afford her fear.

She flew.

The firemen worked through the night to put out the blaze, but they were lucky to be able to contain it to just a few buildings on either side of the Desouche home. The sky gradually lightened, though as usual it was overcast, and so it couldn’t be said that anyone saw the sun rise. But what emerged from the darkness
was a smouldering pile of rubble where the house had stood, and on the sidewalk in front of it, some miserable figures wrapped in the cheap blankets they’d been sleeping in. The firemen collected their hoses and stole away. The police opened the street to the morning traffic.

Grandfather surveyed the smoking ruins through his glass eye and thought, along with what little we owned, I’ve killed another woman. Part of him was bitterly ashamed. But still, he felt now as if he’d been reborn. The past lay consumed, inert and powerless to hurt him. It was late in his life for a man to begin again, but now nothing else was possible.

He saw Marie staring blankly at the ruins, hugging herself against the damp, and shuddering. He threw his arms around her and held her close, and he himself felt comforted.

Marie was light-headed with exhaustion and dread. This was what her years of continued and increasing dedication and work had brought her to. The devastation was complete. She surveyed the open field of ash and char; the fire’d been fuelled so efficiently by the gas that nothing recognizable was left, not any of their possessions or that horrible zombie Hubert, or probably even Cross in his grave. At the edges of the exposed pit that was their home, timbers and pipes and scraps of the neighbours’ dwellings and of the funeral parlour could be distinguished, and across the lane the grey stone wall of the church was blackened; but in the centre, where the blaze had begun, the largest surviving object was
a small dark lump like a burnt potato. Unnoticed, it continued to ooze blood.

In the cold of the November morning, Ville-Marie de l’Incarnation Desouche stood, homeless.

Jean-Baptiste walked home from Bordeaux jail to save the bus fare. He’d never been so far out of his own neighbourhood before, never seen so many unrecognized streets and buildings. Yet they were all unmistakably Montreal. Countless French street names, street-front balconies and staircases, black ironwork and grey stone, and carved gingerbread doors, lintels, gables. Grey churches with green peaked roofs. Buses with brown and cream paint, red brick schools covering whole blocks, six storeys high, corner stores with their doors literally cutting the points of corners, always painted the same green as those church roofs. Enormous quantities of beer and cigarettes being carted up or down the block by ten- and twelve-year-olds fetching for their parents.

He walked streets with names like Henri-Julien, Cartier, Dollard. The city was alive with its ghosts, took special care to remember its dead, and surrounded itself above and below, on all sides, with the past, with corpses, with death itself. The invisible visitants of the Catholic spirit world haunted his every step, dogged him in all his travels: coming along St-Joseph he discovered St-Denis was blocked with construction, so he continued to St-Laurent.

From Ste-Agnès to St-Zotique, from Ste-Anne to Ste-Thérèse, the dead came back to life every moment of every day in Montreal, and poked and jabbed, laughed and derided the inhabitants ceaselessly, in every quarter of the city. There was no escape from their influence, from their judgment. Like the demons of a preliterate culture they swirled in the winds gusting down from the mountain, flipped hats from heads, inverted umbrellas, tossed leaves and garbage at faces. These imps of the past, ghosts of Montreal and gremlins of Catholicism, were a gang of adolescent troublemakers getting their revenge on the living for the direction they were taking, for paving their cemeteries, for toppling their statues and church spires, for the fact of not having died yet.

It all looked so shabby, like the home he was returning to.

Coming along Pine Avenue he noticed the darker smudge of smoke against the overcast sky and was conscious of foreboding. He turned down Park Avenue and saw one remaining red truck pumping water where his house used to be, and traffic edging its way around the obstruction. He saw neighbours and strangers hanging about. He stopped where he was. He saw Grandfather embracing Marie; he saw Uncle in his dressing gown, smoking and staring. He saw Father, and Mother—clearly awake, still in her nightdress—hugging each other, crying, laughing, so that he couldn’t tell whether they were devastated or overjoyed.

From this distance, when he looked at his sister, he saw Father’s features, just as he could see Uncle’s face
in Father; he remembered looking in the mirror and seeing his mother’s eyes looking back at him, and how she’d always said he had Angus’s eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to move any closer. He’d been too long away to feel at ease with them now, under these circumstances. And he couldn’t bear to confirm that they’d all lost everything, that all his books, his poetry and scribblings and boxes of magazines, were gone. In a puff of smoke.

All he had now were the notebooks he carried with him, and the uncashed cheque. He turned about in the street, looking up the hill of Park Avenue, looking back the way he’d come, looking westward across the street. He looked at the papers in his hand, covered with his own messy scribbling. Patriotes. Rebels. Abortionists. Poets. It suddenly seemed too real, not historical at all, not even as fantastic as he’d feared. But how could he write any of this? What had happened when he dared approach the truth in his play? What good had come of it, for anyone?

It suddenly seemed so unimportant.

Jean-Baptiste had had enough of writing what he knew. It only caused trouble. He vowed he would never again write down a single thing in a realistic mode, because whether it had ever actually happened to him or not, whether he actually believed in it or not, everyone would think it was the literal truth. As if simply because
they
had absolutely no power of imagination, no one else had any either, and therefore whatever he put down on paper was talking out of school. Kissing and telling.

Enough. From now on he’d write only about other times and other places, preferably places that never really existed, and mix up all the times together whenever it pleased him. And he’d describe only characters who were complete idiots, because everyone who read his work would think they were wise, and therefore that he’d made them up. And events that were clearly impossible, fantastic things out of fairy tales, because people would think they were somehow metaphors for a secret truth.

There was only one direction open now. He’d tear up his notes, his scattered drafts, and begin again. He moved down the street to join his family. A string of words occurred to him:

Montreal, an island …