Black Bird Read online

  Since it was now an established fact that Mother’s friends would visit several times a week, Father made the effort to put the front parlour into a condition to receive guests. The furniture was removed, the floor swept and washed, the imitation oriental rug unrolled after so many months, and the nesting spiders relocated into oblivion. Finally, the furniture made its return, in a new arrangement supervised by Aline, who swooped down upon this chance to make a mark of her own on the house and revealed a startling capacity for self-assertion. She even suggested a new renovation project, that a door should be knocked out of the rear wall to provide direct access to the kitchen through the pantry and eliminate the need to carry trays up and down the long hallway. There was an idea for Father to ponder.

  Mrs. Harrison arrived amidst a cloud of tobacco smoke, frail and bent as driftwood, mumbling her hellos and putting out an arm to steady herself in the hall. She was so small she needed Aline’s help to hang her cloth coat up on the hook. Mrs. Pangloss, who had never been shy of showing her hostility to Grandfather, and who had already had the news of his misfortune, reacted by storming in as if she were home, quoting the Bible. Just as Aline was bringing in the tea, she bellowed, “An eye for an eye, my dears. The Lord gives us what we deserve,” and nodded her head vigorously in agreement with herself. Aline, who only half understood what had been said, was frightened by the remark because it stung her with the memory of her own words to Grandfather.

  When Mrs. Harrison ventured that her remark “wasn’t very nice,” Mrs. Pangloss replied that the Lord was not obliged to be nice, on account of his mysterious ways. Mrs. Pangloss never hesitated to identify her own will with that of the Lord because there were always plenty of people—Father Pheley, for instance, or any number of doctors, or many of her fellow callers to phone-in radio shows—who readily agreed with her quick grasp of that clearly defined line between right and wrong. Though truth to tell, it’s possible some of them had simply learned the futility of argument. And speaking of doctors, had Mother yet been to see her own regarding her over-long mourning?

  Mother’s eyes rose to meet Mrs. Pangloss’s gaze. Had it been that long? Just how long had it been?

  A cigarette quivering in her outstretched hand, Mrs. Harrison said, “Leave her be,” as best she could while trying to retain her ill-fitting dentures. Clacking them into place, she continued, “Everybody’s different. She needs her time.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Father Pheley,” insisted Mrs. Pangloss, who, although she knew her friend to be Presbyterian, felt everyone ought to be Catholic and refused to believe those disgraceful rumours about the Church and its servants. “He’ll put you right.”

  As if there were something wrong with me, thought Mother. She remembered the rumours all too well—Angus had been fond of referring to them—and the incident in Marie’s childhood.

  “He’s Catholic,” objected Mrs. Harrison, puffing.

  “You old fool, of course he’s Catholic. He’s a priest.” Mrs. Pangloss’s temper rose with her exasperation. How anyone could tolerate that brainless harridan was beyond her.

  “She should burn sandalwood.” By now, the two were speaking as if Mother were absent.

  Mrs. Pangloss pulled herself erect with a hand on her hip, tilting her head. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “It’d make her feel better. The smell. It smells good.”

  “Fer crying out loud.” Pangloss paused. “You think smelling up the house will make anyone feel good? That’s for witches. That’ll give her a headache.”

  “I saw it on TV.”

  “Oh, it must have been a horror show.”

  “No, it was Mass. From Rome. The Pope. The Pope.”

  For once Mrs. Pangloss was silent.

  “He’s a priest,” said Mrs. Harrison.

  Mrs. Pangloss continued to encourage Mother to see a doctor, because although she still believed that whatever took place was the will of God, she was not a Mormon, and thought that doctors were also the will of God because many of them had told her so. While no one else thought this line of reasoning made any sense, everyone agreed a visit to the doctor—any trip out of the house—would probably do her some good. Mother finally cracked under the pressure and went to her family physician.

  Dr. Hyde hadn’t seen her since he’d delivered her of twins, and so happily went about a battery of tests when Mother couldn’t be more specific than to say she felt “under the weather.” He made her undress and weighed and measured her; he took her blood pressure and her temperature. He had her pee into a cup; he examined her urine as closely as he could. He examined her breasts for lumps. He wasn’t sure, so it took a long time. He made her put her feet into the stirrups and bent into her with cold, dry implements. He was thorough. He put on rubber gloves, which he lubricated, and was more thorough. Finally, as she lay with her legs still spread into the air, he simply stood and stared at her for such a long time that she slowly turned completely red; and then, just as slowly, she resumed her natural colour; and then she began to worry. At last he announced he could find nothing wrong with her.

  Why then did she feel so out of sorts? Gently, the doctor tried to suggest she was just having trouble accepting her grief, and therefore was, well, mentally unbalanced. Perhaps she simply needed some rest. In any case, he would do for her what he did for everyone when he had no idea what was wrong with them: prescribe tranquillizers.

  The small square of paper he handed her at least made Mother feel she hadn’t endured the whole ordeal for nothing. But unbalanced? She was puzzled and tried to decide how that could be. It was a fact that since she was a small girl, she had developed the habit of sleeping on a different side each night. Because Angus had tried to raise her with a sense of regularity, she took to sleeping on her right side on even-numbered nights, and her left on odd-numbered nights. But suddenly she realized that the calendar is mostly made up of odd-numbered days. Whenever the thirty-first came along, she would sleep on her left side. But the next day, the first, was also an odd day. So in fact she had been sleeping more often on one side than the other. She realized that all these years of asymmetrical sleeping must have made her brain slide around in her head, until now it wasn’t sitting straight in her skull. The doctor was right: she was mentally unbalanced.

  What to do about it? Well, he’d said rest, and given her tranquillizers. Obviously she needed to correct the imbalance. She would go straight home and start sleeping on her right side, regardless of whether it was an odd or an even day. And she would sleep until she had regained her mental equilibrium.

  It took quite some time.

  Uncle was introduced to his first dog when he was only a child. Fittingly it was just a puppy itself, and he hated it instantly because it refused to be paper trained. But taking it for a walk was something of a pleasure, if only to get away from a house which even then abutted on the funeral parlour on one side, and a crazy woman’s on the other.

  Grandfather’s preferred method of instructing his children was to beat them when they acted contrary to his wishes. So there had been a loud row with Grandmother as Uncle cowered upstairs, listening without his supper. For once, Grandmother had won: instead of being punished for killing the neighbour child’s hamster, Uncle was to be shown the value of life and the responsibility of owning a pet. (In truth, Grandfather was not upset at the slaying itself, but that a child of his took no care to hide the crime. An attitude like that was the privilege only of those beyond the law by reason of birth or wealth or sheer force of personality—a Bronfman, a Van Horne, a Duplessis—but certainly not a Desouche. Regardless, this quibble had no bearing on the argument over an appropriate punishment.)

  Next day, Grandmother took him on the streetcar to the SPCA and kept him there until he had chosen a puppy. Understanding that the lesson he was being taught was not one he could acknowledge and then forsake immediately, he whined and protested. The thought of a lifetime of daily caring for and nurturing his sin was as repellent t
o the child as it would be to any adult. Grandmother, who considered this method of educating him a gift and would never have understood his reluctance even if Uncle had been able to explain his reasoning, was as startled by this reaction as were the clerks at the animal shelter.

  “Never seen a young boy didn’t want a puppy,” they exclaimed and remarked, and called in every one of their co-workers to see the petulant and contrary child.

  At last Uncle broke down, not under Grandmother’s patience but under their collective gaze of wonderment, and grudgingly chose a listless young animal that seemed to him older—and closer to death—than the others. In fact, it was merely sick and undernourished. Under ordinary circumstances Grandmother wouldn’t have allowed an unhealthy dog into her house, but she was compelled to consider she’d won some sort of victory, and perhaps nursing it back to health would produce exactly the effect on her young son for which she was hoping.

  It didn’t. Uncle clearly wanted nothing to do with the creature and there was something about it so indefinably unsavoury that no one else could take any pleasure in its presence. Nevertheless, Grandmother spent more energy ensuring that Uncle looked after it than she would have doing the job herself. Reluctantly he fed and watered and walked it twice a day, even though when he did, the other children in the neighbourhood took care to be absent. It remained a sickly thing, head drooping, eyes watery, rarely a wag of the tail; it remained untrained, and Grandfather bellowed and cursed whenever he set foot in its droppings in his own house. But it remained only as long as it had to, for one day, long, weary dog-years later, it disappeared.

  No one knew whether it had got loose and been struck by a car, or struck out on its own for its own mysterious reasons, or even whether Uncle had finally done something about it. But as Uncle grew into adolescence he left it behind with the rest of his infancy, and it simply was no longer a part of his life, like so many childhood sins, until on a summer’s dog day, it seemed to have simply evaporated in the heat.

  The black dog followed Uncle home the first year he began working with Grandfather, in fact on his very first job. It was one of only two times they were discovered at work.

  Who this witness was they never knew. Whether some groundskeeper or some darkly romantic soul taken with wandering through graveyards in the middle of the night, or simply some homeless unfortunate. It mattered little. But discovery was unacceptable. Discovery was death to them—arrest, shame, unemployment—and so it meant death to their discoverer. While Grandfather kept the man’s attention, Uncle moved behind him and swung the shovel like a baseball bat. Almost, the anonymous head flew out of the park; the blow, at least, was strong enough. But the spine and neck would not let go, and it merely leapt forward first, before the rest of the body came crashing behind it.

  “Criss,” said Grandfather.

  A discussion ensued. Could they take this one to the doctor’s back door too? That was a tempting plum: two bodies to sell, for the work of just one.

  But no, Grandfather reasoned, a medical man could easily spot the difference between a disinterred corpse and a murder victim. And though it might not make any difference to him, it might. It just might. Or then, it could be a fact taken careful note of and stored away for maturation, like a wine or a cheese, only to be resurrected at some future opportunity, to be enjoyed in the fullness of its strength.

  Either way, it was simply too great a risk. When Uncle, a greedy neophyte, protested too much caution, Grandfather reminded him of the legendary status attained in their profession by Burke and Hare, and how in that case only the doctor had got off scot-free.

  Reluctantly, then, Uncle pushed the fresher of the corpses into the grave, at the foot of which sat the dead man’s dog. It neither howled nor barked, not raising any kind of a protest or even sniffing its master or his new resting place. It merely yawned and watched. And when the two men took up their burden of shovels, lanterns and sacks, it trod along behind them as if it had done so all its life.

  It would not be got rid of, and Uncle discovered he felt quite at home with his anger towards it, and the practice of kicking and slapping it. And so he settled into a life with it.

  The second time they were caught, they were just lowering a coffin back into the ground. A figure ran screaming out of the night, right into the grave, and lay startled and injured in silence.

  Uncle looked in. “It’s a woman,” he said.

  Grandfather turned on his flashlight. It was a man in a dress.

  Two more figures came running over the hill. Grandfather snapped off his light and began to move away. The fellow in the grave pleaded. “Don’t leave me with them.”

  They were cops, from the neighbourhood. They had no pants.

  On opposite sides of the open grave, the four men recognized each other. Slowly Uncle turned and gathered up their things. He and Grandfather took up their large, full sack.

  “Tabernac,” said the younger cop. He was panting.

  The older one said, “Ferme ta gueule.”

  “And keep your pants on,” said Grandfather. He and Uncle turned their backs and walked away. They weren’t stopped, and if they heard any noises behind them, they made no comment.

  Ville-Marie de l’Incarnation Desouche and her brother Jean-Baptiste were born only an instant apart in those brief seconds between 11:59 P.M. and 12 A.M. either on June 24th, if one wanted it to be St-Jean-Baptiste Day—as Marie wanted, and why couldn’t she have been named for the Fête Nationale?—or on June 25th, if one liked the idea of being the antipode to Christmas—which Jean-Baptiste did, for poetic reasons that he himself couldn’t clearly define (or at least, that’s how he thought of it; but it could simply have been an inherited grasping for symmetry and balance, passed down through Mother from Angus); and perhaps because of that they retained something ineffable about them, as should the day. Or its cognate.

  Further, the event took place not at the Royal Victoria but at the Reddy Memorial, a lesser anglo hospital that stood on Atwater Street. The same Atwater that divided (English) Westmount from (French) Montreal, the same Atwater that was so treacherous with black ice on dark winter nights. Born at midnight, on that border, a boy and a girl, of an English mother and a French father.

  Could they be anything but doomed?

  One chose words and the other actions, but they both believed in exploding complacent notions of the status quo; one revered Artaud, the other Che Guevara, both of whom upheld, at heart, the idea of honesty.

  Thus, Marie was furious with Hubert.

  No matter how long and hard Hubert tried to explain to Marie that he felt it necessary to act as he had, to deceive her in the greater interest of their cause, it made no difference: she slapped him and spat at him when he tried to take her around the waist, to fondle her bosom, to calm her in their bed. He realized now, of course, that his precautions had been too stringent, that she could be trusted totally. Yet couldn’t he be forgiven for treading lightly on family connections, especially in a mixed family?

  Well, that deserved another blow; after which, “I am Desouche,” cried Marie. “I have proven myself in direct action, with dynamite. Have you? You’re a scribbler, like Jean-Baptiste. You do nothing. And you doubt me?”

  Her words stung. True, he was their ideologue: he was their only university-educated cell member. True, he’d had the same difficulties with his former professors as he was now having with Marie, that they refused to see he was right, that they stubbornly clung to their bourgeois faith in political, not revolutionary, action. True, further, that his passionate tirades against their complacency, which was tantamount to collaboration with les têtes carrées, netted him only expulsion from the Université du Québec.

  But he was no coward. Hadn’t he authorized all the bombings? Hadn’t he planned the bank robberies? Hadn’t he stood in public distributing pamphlets and haranguing Anglos? Wasn’t he always the one urging action, casting the deciding vote in favour of change, not caution?

  Hubert had never
flinched in a crisis, never hesitated to give orders, to decide. As leader of the cell it had been his role. Some others were smarter, including Marie, and some were better connected; and he was always silent in debates, letting others argue and discuss. But whenever there was a deadlock or doubt, all turned to him to break it. And having listened to all voices, when it was clear the issue wasn’t clear at all, he decided. Always on the side of instant action and today’s goals, always for the good of the cause. Always what he imagined he would someday be rewarded for, when Quebec was its own sovereign nation, by its own head of state. By the very man presently both premier and leader of the Péquistes—the Parti Québécois.

  Hubert considered the Péquiste premier to be the future of Quebec: “He is our destiny.” And he considered all his fellow felquistes as the natural, military extension of the Péquiste political party. He knew that someday, when separation had finally been achieved, all felquistes would be lionized and welcomed to places of honour in the new nation.

  In fact, Hubert dreamt of receiving a medal from the premier himself, on a platform before a cheering crowd. And that was just the beginning. On occasions when he allowed his fantasy to flow out to its end, he became not just a decorated hero of the revolution, but afterwards a revered public speaker and journalist, and finally a respected and tenured professor of political science at that same large French Montreal university that had turfed him out in his youth. He would be appointed to chair committees on social and cultural issues, his classes would be crowded with silently awed young faces receiving the wisdom not only of his thoughts but of his active experience, and the hallways would be cloudy with the cigarette smoke of the Revolution.

  In other words, Hubert’s idea of revolution was not to change at all the way in which Quebec society treated itself, but merely to change who was cracking the whip.