Poached Egg on Toast (7 page)

Far from the mainland, far from the Island, Josie could
see
how the animal felt. Caught between. And being between was about being alone. Between lovers, between stories, between friends, between the abstract and the concrete, between moments of safety and moments of danger, between moments of love and moments of despair. Between the bottom sheet and Richard (between the dash and the upholstery). Between the mainland and the Island. Open water. Adrift. Pack Ice. Ah, Sea.

ÉTÉ

It is whispered, Madame Lalonde, she asked the priest and he said, “No,” very firmly What does it matter to him that babies sleep in the same attic room, that children tumble over banisters, that they run through gangways pitching gravel at old Hervé, the policeman, when he rides past on his bike?

It is whispered, Madame Lalonde …

“No.”

“Again.” Lips stretch thin and curl back over the news.

“Poor Madame. What will she do with them all? And he. He’s no help to her, that good-for-nothing.”

“He’s tired, poor man. C’est ça.”

At dusk the cross on the hill is ablaze. You can see it for miles, from here, from there, from across the river. In daytime the children go to the top of the hill to look for blood, for miracles.

Madame Lalonde’s is the last house on the dirt road that dwindles to grass and old tire tracks at the bottom of the hill. How that cross glows at night! The bulbs are replaced the very day they burn out. Or are peppered by the stones of hooligans. At night the cross carves its perpendiculars into Madame’s bedroom wall. Even from her bed, she can see it. That cross.

Pitou lies on his side in the dusty road. It is dry, hot. Pitou has no energy. Get up, Pitou. Shoo. Leave him alone. What car ever comes here? Only the ice wagon, and Pitou has lots of time to move before that old nag gets here. Monsieur, he walks to rue Principale and takes the grey rickety bus to work.

The children are playing in a field of goldenrod and blue thistles.

Amélie wants to go out, too. Not until the margarine is done. Knead the pellets till the colour bursts like shrapnel through the yielding bag. Pound it with your tiny fist, squeeze between the fingers. The colour spreads like a waxy orange a child might choose to paint the sun. Soon, the kneading is done; the margarine is uniform, harmless, yellow. Go out now, play, Amélie. Only till nine, mind.

The siren will shrill at nine. Ah yes, the curfew. From the top of the town hall, the siren blows the children tidily off the streets. But it also injects excitement and fear into the hearts of the villagers. For if the siren wails and it is not nine o’clock, you go to your back stoop to look for smoke. There is no fire truck here. Only the bucket brigade. That, and the siren, to summon the villagers.

Madame Lalonde has another mouth to feed. This one sleeps downstairs. Already, Madame and her husband have moved their own bed to the dining room. No more space upstairs. If you creep to their window at night, you can see them undressing. In the light of the cross you can see them. Madame Lalonde is tired. Her breasts hang down, always being pulled and tugged and chewed. The baby sleeps in the carriage. Amédée they call him. A good name. A hungry devil, too, she says. Monsieur Lalonde has a new job now. He wears a uniform. The children are proud; their father delivers Vachon cakes to the stores in the city. Now Monsieur revs the truck as he roars home, and Pitou has to pick himself up off the road.

Amélie is outside with her small brother, Jacques. Monsieur Poirot the barber has just cut Jacques’ hair. Amélie has to go with her brother to make sure Poirot knows when to stop cutting. For Poirot keeps an extra bottle on his shelf. He also trades comics with the children when he’s through.

Amélie and Jacques are returning home; it is seven thirty and they are leafing hungrily through the comics. The siren startles. Already? But it is not yet nine.

A little crowd clusters at the window of Madame Lalonde. Amélie and Jacques push their way to look through the limp net of curtain. From the back, Jacques’ hair looks as if Poirot has turned a porridge bowl upside down over it.

Through the dining room, through to the kitchen, they see their parents. Old Hervé is there, too. Hervé the policeman. It is his bike that lies on its side in the gravel. The younger children are spinning the back wheel, holding a cardboard to its spokes. Ra ta tah tat. There is something on the table, a baby, or a doll. A baby, yes, but this doesn’t look like Amédée. This baby is blue and lies very still. Hervé bends over it, breathing into its mouth. Nothing. There is no cry. Nothing. Hervé breathes again and again. The child is fixed like a china ornament on the table. Madame Lalonde wrings her hands. It is no use. You can tell by looking at her face.

Make way! The priest has arrived. His shining black car thumps over the bumps in the road where grass has grown between old tire tracks. He stops in the puddle of gravel, an inch from Hervé’s bike. His black skirts swish as he walks to the door. “Leave the window, my children,” he says to the sober faces in the crowd.

Poor Madame Lalonde. The cross has not even lit up yet, for the night.

When everyone has gone, she dresses Amédée’s cold limbs in the gown in which he was baptized—he and all the others. It has been passed on all the way down from Joseph, the eldest. She stops for a moment beside the still bundle. The tears stream down her cheeks. She turns her head and spits on the scrubbed kitchen floor. Priest or no priest, there will be no other.

When the weather is warm, Hector, the chip man, emerges from his winter cocoon and plants his white cart squarely behind the horse in front of the post office. Tassé runs the post office from the closed-in veranda of his yellow house. The mail truck arrives from the city; Tassé sorts the letters into the silver boxes that line his veranda. The villagers come and go, up and down the steps, stopping to chat with Hector, slapping his old horse gently on the neck.

“Ah, Hector, back in business, you scoundrel. You’ve been getting fat all winter. Nothing to do but draw water. Come on, you dirty dog, give me some chips, and make sure you fill up the bottom, too.”

Behind the murky windows of his cart, Hector scoops thick fries, fresh from the splattering grease, into the cones of waxed brown paper. The children put their nickels on the ledge and hold their breath while Hector adds extra chips on top. As they walk away they cross their fingers, hoping the vinegar will stay in the bottom so they can suck it out when the last chip is gone.

When the mail traffic dwindles and the steps of Tassé’s post office are empty again, Hector knows it is time for supper. He taps the loose reins against the horse’s back, lets go, and the cart begins to wheeze up and down narrow side streets. The women run out to meet him, wiping hands on aprons as they hurry down the paths. They hold out their deep white crockery.

“Lots of mouths to feed, Hector, fill it to the brim.” And dip their hands into the chips on the way back to their kitchens—after they’ve dipped into their apron pockets for the coins.

On Saturday afternoon the beerman comes. In the houses of the village, empties are stacked and ready. The beerman makes his rounds between two and four. Across the village you can hear the empties rattle and the children call, “Beerman! Beerman! La Bière!”

Mr. Smith, too, buys beer. Quincy and Marlene have gathered the empties and have put them by the porch door. They watch the gravel road to see who will come first: beerman? iceman? milkman? The iceman arrives and carries blocks of dripping ice in his steely picks, all the way around the house, down the long gangway, through the back door. He bangs the block into the top of the icebox and pushes aside the small piece left over from yesterday, melted smooth as an ocean stone.

At the front, on the road, his horse jerks and halts, jerks and halts as the children cry, “Whoaaaa!” The children shinny up the back of the cart to the slippery boards, and vie for slender ice chips to suck. Water drips through the wagon boards, leaving a chain of damp circles on the dusty road. The iceman returns and shoos the children away. He clucks to his horse.

If it is a hot day, Mr. Smith buys buttermilk from Borden’s truck for his children. There is a picture of Elsie on the side of the truck—Elsie with the dancing eyes and curly horns. In August, Quincy and Marlene will be taken across the river to the Exhibition, and there they will see, year after year, the real
Elsie the Borden Cow
in her glittering stall.

At last, the beerman arrives. Mr. Smith pays his money and then settles down on the front step with his neighbour, Ti-Jean. There they will stay the entire afternoon, arguing, waving their quart bottles, deciding once and for all who
really
won in ‘59. No matter who comes out ahead, Mr. Smith reminds Quincy and Marlene inside, later: “It’s ours by right of conquest! “ His hand sweeps in an encompassing gesture out towards the land beyond the window. Quincy and Marlene are not so sure. They have had their own skirmishes and are outnumbered, after all. Dubious victors, they have rushed into their house and looked back out through the curtains at the taunting, conquered faces.

Everything around seems to be in a state of being dismissed or constantly damned. Yet nothing goes away—only, finally, and much later, Mr. Smith and his family.

Oh, how the children are bored this summer. They have cut bows and arrows from green saplings; they have fashioned whistles from reeds; they have played deadman in the cove. They have scratched hopscotch into the dirt and thrown cut glass onto the squares. What is there left to do? Visit Mon Oncle Piché on the veranda of his black wooden house!

Mon Oncle is everyone’s uncle. He tilts in his wide rocker, all day, in shelter of the open veranda. He is too heavy to get up to walk around; it is enough effort to get himself into his chair each morning. His head is almost as big as his belly with its layers and layers of hard fat. His hair is cropped short to his scalp, peppered with grey. His black pants, held by suspenders, fit straight up from thigh to chin. All day he sits on the veranda and eats bread and jam.

But Mon Oncle—how he loves the children!

“Viens citte, mon p’tit chou. Come and talk to Mon Oncle.”

The children tell him stories. He teases them; he knows more about them than their parents do. The children know that Mon Oncle can keep a secret. They make wishes and pop brown silky weeds against the back of his spotted hands. He tells them which leaves to smoke and where to find tender shoots of grass to suck. He knows which blossoms attract the whirr of hummingbirds’ wings. He knows about crickets that sing and red-winged blackbirds in the swamp. He imitates the early morning
killdee-killdeer
until the call echoes back from the river.

The children wander off. Mon Oncle Piché sits alone and thinks of all the things he used to know. Then he turns to the propped-up tray beside his chair, and goes back to eating bread and jam.

In the warmth of evening, old Hervé, the policeman, sets out on his bike just as the nine o’clock siren wails to its highest pitch and drones to summer silence again.

“Off the streets. Off! Off the streets.” He tries to wave his fist at the children but it is difficult to keep his balance on the dirt roads with only a single grip on the handlebar.

“Tabernac,” he mutters. The children taunt, one foot in their parents’ yards, the other foot on the street. The leg of Hervé’s trousers gets caught in the bicycle chain and he falls to one side, trying to extricate himself and look fierce at the same time. The silver badge is dull on his plaid shirt. The children roll on the ground, puffing out their sides in fake laughter. The fender is bent and rickety as Hervé wobbles back towards rue Principale, the only street in the village that is paved.

But on Wednesdays, when the garbage truck comes round, the children do not laugh. Hervé’s two big sons rattle the pails; they toss them back and forth with importance, with ease. They spit over the wheeze of truck and the stench of refuse.

“Maudit, don’t get caught after the siren tonight. Our fadder, he will get you tonight.”

Today, there will be a confession. In Quincy and Marlene’s backyard the children congregate beneath the overturned row-boat that rests on two shaky sawhorses.

No Protestant rite can match this. Marlene preens; she and Quincy will receive instruction from Pierrette and Hercules. Hercules will be priest.

The children kneel in the grass beneath the boat. Hercules’ head is hidden in the shadows somewhere above one of the wooden seats. His black eyes scrutinize the souls of these young sinners.

“Do you have anything to confess?” Sternly.

“I laughed at Hervé when he fell off his bike.”

“I swore at Pitou … and broke a plate.”

“I wore shorts on Main Street. Against the priest’s will.”

“More? Robbery? Violence?”

“I had a bad thought in my heart,” says Pierrette. Marlene is prepared for this. You have to confess all deeds committed and uncommitted. Those in your heart count for as much as the act.

“Any
DIRTY THOUGHTS
?” Hercules asks this gleefully.

They shriek with laughter as he doles out the penance.

“Fifteen Hail Marys before supper.” He makes the sign of the cross.

But the children are gone. Like the breeze they have scattered.

Jacques is sent to Chez Henri to buy peameal bacon. It is Thursday.

“We’ll have bacon and eggs tonight,” says Madame Lalonde. “Back to sardines tomorrow.”

Jacques skulks to the store. He tosses tiny pebbles into the air, kicks a smooth round rock from square to square in the sidewalk. It must not touch a crack.

Jacques does not want to tell Henri to put anything on the bill—that pale lined pad, each page glaring accusation as Henri’s wife presses upon the carbon with her soft pencil. At the end of the day, the balance will be entered in the black ledger.

“Don’t forget to tell your father to make a payment,” she says.