Black Bird Read online

  “Yes, with the crowds.”

  And so, from that day on, whenever there seemed some especial reason to speak to God, something out of the usual line of Bless Papa and bless Mama and bless the neighbours too, Aline made the trip to St. Joseph’s and knelt before the relic of Frère André.

  For the sake of an eye, for the sake of a bird, she prayed to a shrivelled black heart. “Forgive and heal my husband in your mercy, Lord, and bring Grace back to me.”

  On the afternoon Mother went to sleep she’d been thinking about Angus because his death was the cause of her grief and his insistence on regularity was the cause of her malady. And so his was the face that first took shape in her dreams.

  Angus had never been in a dream before. He’d had them like anyone else, but this feeling was something different. It was still amorphous, still entirely unpredictable and absurd, still faded at its edges into an insensible void, still finite but unbounded. But it was also definitely not like any dream he could remember because he was inside it, instead of the other way around. Things happened, time passed back and forth, immense objects appeared in his path yet failed to obstruct it. Primal fears took hold instantly without warning or reason, but without incongruity: he was naked before an immense crowd; he’d been climbing a staircase forever; he fell from an immeasurable height; he flew; the car’s brakes failed; he made love to Isabel; he slept; his daughter dreamt he was approaching her.

  He asked her, “What the hell happened to me?”

  “You died in the war,” she said. “Don’t do it again.”

  The peasants were storming the castle and the dance of pitchforks and torches overwhelmed their conversation like surf on the beach. Both tried to speak and failed.

  It did no good to turn her as Dr. Hyde had suggested, to prevent bedsores. She simply returned to her side as if she were a boat righting herself. She slept so much they thought she must be sick. Yet she had no fever, never moaned or cried out in delirium, didn’t even toss and turn during her dreams; she always seemed simply and happily asleep. The medication was slowly disappearing, which was a mystery since Mother was never awake to take it.

  The more and better she slept, the more fitfully did Father; which eventually brought the solution to the case of the disappearing pills. He tossed and turned, aware of the unnaturally inert form of his wife. He’d gotten used to her immobility, so that when she did move, it woke him instantly. And this time he saw her sit up, open the vial, shake out two pills and swallow them with water before settling back in bed. And he realized she’d done so entirely in her sleep.

  After days of sleeping beside her, he could stand no more. It was just too creepy; he couldn’t share the bed with her any longer. Since there were no available empty rooms except the front parlour, that’s where they moved her—and her friends continued to visit her, as if she were in a hospital bed.

  She lay semi-fetally as if in prayer, with her hands clasped together and her head nodding towards them, her thin grey hair clinging from neglect.

  At first Aline was shocked by what seemed to her Father’s disposal of his wife: how could he not have wanted her in his bed? But as she began to assist in the minimal care Mother seemed to need (an airing of the sheets, an occasional sponge bath, feeding like a baby) she came to understand how uneasy her condition had made him. It was certainly unnatural, and yet nothing seemed the matter with her. In fact, if it were possible to judge by her face and the lack of tension in her body, she seemed now to be content, practically happy. It was almost as if she were simply awaiting something and had stopped bothering to suffer through life in the meantime.

  When Mrs. Pangloss arrived the day after they’d installed Mother on a folding cot in the parlour, she began a panicked keening: a screeching wail pitched as high as she could manage without cracking her voice. It was her instinctual and habitual way of entering a wake, beginning high and loud with shock and disbelief, and it usually gave way first to a moaning despair and finally to a quiet sobbing in a corner, with only an occasional outburst designed to refocus the other mourners’ attention on herself. Funerals are, after all, for the living.

  Aline didn’t know much about Mrs. Pangloss’s habits but she could tell instantly that she thought Mother was dead. Mrs. Pangloss managed to choke out the usual baffled questions—“What happened? Was it an accident? I didn’t know she was sick! Oh, the poor woman. Was it quick? Did she suffer?”—and as usual didn’t bother to wait for the answers.

  Aline attempted to calm her by mustering what little broken English she could, but under the rush of Mrs. Pangloss’s exclamatory grief she was reduced to tugging on the woman’s sleeve and muttering, “Non, madame, non.”

  And then, unexpectedly, Mrs. Pangloss did something Aline would otherwise have judged as impossible as anything absurdly imaginable, like walking on the Sun or meeting Elvis; something which shattered totally her view of the woman and cast into doubt her opinions of all Anglos.

  Mrs. Pangloss spoke in French.

  Aline stepped back under the blow.

  Haltingly, as if the words had made no sense to her, she framed her simple reply almost as a question: “Elle dort.” She’s sleeping.

  Mrs. Pangloss moaned hugely and all the tension lapsed from her face; she slumped into an overstuffed armchair and buried herself in the cheap cloth coat she was still wearing. She breathed ferociously, holding her heart as if to keep it in place. Aline couldn’t tell if she was relieved or disappointed.

  Aline stood nervously, not daring to approach the woman, not knowing what to say or do. Should she take her coat? Should she try to explain Mother’s condition, when it had commenced, why they had moved her to the front parlour? Should she speak in French or English?

  At that moment, Dr. Hyde arrived and relieved her of any responsibility. Aline was torn between her resentment of his presumption of authority in what was really her house and not his after all, and her relief at not having to choose a course of action. She hung both their coats and retired to the kitchen to prepare tea.

  “Bodies,” said Dr. Hyde, “are fascinating and disgusting.”

  He took Mother’s pulse. “They are always with us; they are perhaps the sum of our existence. Yet we always feel as if they were adjunct to ourselves. They are filthy and they produce filth. We may lose parts of them, appendages or even internal organs, and go on living feeling that we are still ourselves. So we speak of them as if they were separate from our existential selves.”

  He listened to her heartbeat. “We have mapped them, inside and out; we have charted their histories and divined their workings so that we know what parts belong in which place and how they are supposed to function. We have experimented with them and subjected them to torture, chemicals, extremes of climate, so that we know more or less the conditions necessary to their well-being. We have deduced a Platonic ideal against which we measure ourselves and our patients: this is the practice of medicine.”

  He placed the stethoscope on her back and listened to her breathing. “Yet we are forever stumbling across exceptions, aberrations and inexplicable circumstances. Miraculous cures, astonishing survivals, even unaccountable deaths. And this, Madame Desouche’s curious repose.”

  Mrs. Pangloss nibbled a crustless devilled ham sandwich and nodded. She firmly believed that when one found oneself in the presence of a professional, educated man, one should take advantage of listening to him in order to better oneself. Especially if he was a doctor. It had always puzzled her that her friends the Desouches should have Dr. Cameron Hyde as their family physician, and it stunned her now to see that not only had they been telling the truth about it, but he would deign to descend from his famous institute on the slopes of Mount Royal and actually pay a house call.

  He was, after all, a famous man who had done unbelievable things. An indisputable genius since the days when Time—an American magazine, mind you—had put him on its cover, he was invested with all the unquestioning confidence of the hospital and the university to
which he’d brought fame and money by his brilliant experiments into brains, bodies, psyches and souls. So overwhelming was his authority in Montreal that not even those whose heads he’d cut open (whether in an effort to shrink them, or merely to introduce needle-thin electric prods), or those to whom he’d sequestered in sensory deprivation tanks and secretly administered the new, mysterious lysergic acid, or those whom he’d restrained, doused, disoriented or otherwise tortured—not even those poor people (and they were usually poor) had once imagined that their “treatments” were anything but proper. No one had ever thought that Dr. Hyde’s actions might be unorthodox, unethical, illegal … monstrous. Not for years would anyone suspect that they might be actionable, although frequently they were acknowledged, sometimes by Hyde himself, as “experimental.” But then only grudgingly.

  And besides, he (or they) would say, just look at the results. More donations to the hospital, more government and private funding of research at both McGill and the Royal Vic, more acclaim within the medical community for both Hyde and hospital.

  But damned few cures or recoveries. Never mind; if none of the ex-patients were complaining, there must be good reason. Many of them were dead or vegetative or otherwise, but that only proved the need for further research.

  Mother’s case was quite interesting; she simply lay down to sleep and refused to wake up. It certainly wasn’t anything he had told or asked her to do, or thought might do her any good, or even thought of at all. True, he had a ward full of comatose and vegetative cases up the mountain, but they were mostly in reaction to “developmental treatments” or “radical therapies.”

  “Why’s she asleep, Doctor?” asked Mrs. Pangloss.

  He opened Mother’s left eye and shone a penlight into it as if he were looking for something that had rolled under the bed. “I don’t know. I’ve done nothing to her.”

  “Didn’t you give her some pills?”

  “Yes, but she’s taken them all and I won’t give her more. Besides, they wouldn’t account for this.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “She’s simply asleep. It’s a mystery.”

  Mrs. Pangloss gulped some tea. “The Lord, then, eh? Mysterious Ways. That’s what Father Pheley says.”

  Dr. Hyde put away his tools. “Yes. Well, it would help if His ways were not so mysterious to physicians.”

  Mrs. Pangloss was devastated. It was too much. On the one hand, here was the city’s most celebrated man of medicine attending her friend in her very own home, in Mrs. Pangloss’s own presence. On the other, he not only could do nothing for her, he admitted he was baffled. Further, she suspected his remarks bordered on blasphemy. Not only Mysterious Ways, but a clear-cut example of Giveth and Taketh in the same instance.

  When Father and Jean-Baptiste entered to hear the diagnosis, the doctor prattled on in the most extravagant of Latin phrases about what exactly he had done and in the least common medical jargon about what exactly he had found. Jean-Baptiste was looking at him quite suspiciously. Father finally pressed the point.

  “But what is it?”

  Dr. Hyde donned his greatcoat and heaved a sigh. “Brain fever,” he said.

  “Brain fever? My God. What can we do, Doctor?”

  He put on his hat, took his gloves from his pockets. “Keep the windows open. It’s too hot in here. And wait.”

  Father was clearly burdened with this news. Why wasn’t there something to be done? A prescription, a treatment, even an operation? Why couldn’t it simply be over with, and let them all get back to their lives?

  When Dr. Hyde had left and Aline was clearing away his untouched plate and cup, Mrs. Pangloss remarked, “He’s not so smart. Great Man. In a pig’s eye.”

  “What the hell is brain fever?” asked Father.

  “A usually mortal affliction in Victorian novels,” said Jean-Baptiste.

  Father’s voice broke. “What!”

  “Nothing,” said Jean-Baptiste. “It’s nothing at all.”

  Mrs. Pangloss asked, “You mean it’s like psychosomatic? Is that the word?”

  “Yes,” said Jean-Baptiste. “Except it’s the doctor imagining the illness, not the patient.”

  So Mother slept and life was easier for her; but Grandfather couldn’t. There was, first of all, the pain. Although now it had dulled considerably, it was still constant and likely to stay that way for some time, according to Dr. Hyde. And whenever he closed the other eye, he still tried to close the absent one and received a stabbing reminder that he couldn’t. And then there was the intermittent presence of Grace at the window. She was like Captain Hook’s crocodile, hanging around as if she wasn’t finished with him.

  There was also the proposal Dr. Hyde had put to him to consider: transplant or artificial? Though it was now almost too late for a transplant—too much healing would preclude the idea. And there was the problem of a suitable donor. Besides which, the thought of someone else’s eye in his head was not a pleasing one. Would it even fit properly? What would he see with it? Would it match the other? No, better to go without. A simple patch might be best—wait, now we’re back to Captain Hook and that damned bird.

  That was it, then. A glass eye.

  Just as Grandfather made this decision, he received a visit from Mrs. Pangloss, who came to the hospital despite her dislike of him simply because he presented her with an opportunity to visit someone else’s misery.

  He groaned when he saw her, which she chose to accept as a greeting.

  “I had to visit Billy Berri anyway,” she said. “He’s just had a prostrate operation. Insisted on showing me his catheter.” And she made a noise something like a giggle, but altogether too much like a cackle. She sat beside Grandfather’s bed, trying to look around and under his bandages to see the wound. When she couldn’t, she surveyed the ward in the same manner.

  “You don’t look so good. Coming along? Well. Christ, you want to get out as quick as you can. House of horrors in here. Creepy old place. Not that you’re not used to that sort of thing, that house of yours, next to the funeral parlour. Nurse! Nurse! Open a window. We need some air in here, it’s not a morgue. He he hee.”

  There was one thing the two could agree on: the hospital was no place for a sick person. Both were old enough to remember the days when few people ever returned from hospitals, and the association was still strong in them: hospitals were houses of death. What do you expect when you put so many diseased souls together in one place? Whatever germs, microbes, viral infections, diseases and bacteria you were relatively free of before going in would surely be coming out with you—if you survived. If they didn’t kill you, they at least made you a carrier, a host.

  Aside from that, there were the surgeons to fear. Mrs. Pangloss suspected the very idea of tampering with God’s work: if He’d put something in there, who were we to take it out? But she was forced to admit their successes and grudgingly bowed to an intelligence greater than hers; which after all was also a gift from above.

  Grandfather, however, was on familiar terms with at least one surgeon, his own family doctor, Cameron Hyde. And this certainly did not put him at ease. It wasn’t a question of religion with Grandfather. He’d never been convinced that human life, or any life, was in any way connected to anything supernatural at all. If asked, he’d deny entirely the very existence of the supernatural. No, his doubts were quite firmly based in the physical. He knew a thing or two about bodies and how they fitted together. Surgeons, however, always seemed more interested in getting them apart.

  In a word, butchers.

  So the idea that he’d been under the knife himself was one he was having trouble accepting, one he was in fact trying to suppress, and the thought that he might have to undergo yet another operation unnerved him.

  Bandage; eye patch; glass eye; perhaps even a human eye. But never again his own.

  Grace scratched at the frost-covered window, startling Mrs. Pangloss. “Crikey, is that your wife’s buzzard? No wonder you won’t open the window. W
hat’s she doin’ here, trying to get another taste? Hee he hee. Oh, that’s a filthy bird. You must be glad she’s out of the house.”

  Strangely, thought Grandfather, another point of agreement between them. Or at least it would be, under ordinary circumstances. But at the moment, since he was not in the house, he would prefer that Grace were. Or at least that she were somewhere away from him. He sat up a little and turned his own single, baleful eye upon her.

  With a screech, she flew away.

  Somehow, they were all home for Christmas. As usual, there was no money for extravagances or even decent presents, and not enough real cheer among them to warrant giving one another anything frivolous. Mother slept through it, of course, but Father slipped her present, a new pillow, tenderly under her head. Aline had taken up a collection and they’d all scraped up enough money to make a down payment on Grandfather’s new glass eye. Aline herself received a set of aprons and oven mitts; Father and Uncle got cigarettes. Jean-Baptiste had been put in charge of his sister’s gift and agonized over it. What would she want? How little he knew her, how little they had in common, he realized. He fell back on buying her a book, of all things, terrified she’d throw it back in his face. But what else did he know? At least he’d tried to find one on a subject that might interest her, and presented her with Marighella’s Manual of the Urban Guerrilla.

  The rest of them, especially Father, might have been happy to consider Marie’s mere presence gift enough from her. Yet she had insisted on doing her duty to the family and ungrudgingly moved herself to choose Jean-Baptiste’s present. And since she couldn’t help herself in the face of the overwhelming sentiment of Christmas, which, even if it has no spiritual meaning, retains for most Québécois the enormous force of the most important of family rituals, she tried her hardest to choose something that would genuinely please him.

  Everyone expected it would be a book. There was little point in buying him anything else. That had been learned by them all through years of experience. He might scorn any kind of practical or well-meant trifle—a sweater he’d never wear, chocolates he wouldn’t eat because they were milk, not dark—but no matter what book anyone ever gave him, it always elicited a genuinely grateful response. Even if it was one he’d no interest in reading.