Part 1
All the Voices Cry.
Alice Petersen.
After Summer.
JAKE AND I GREW up without a mother, which wasn't that bad, although we ate a lot of boiled peas. Back when we were kids, before Valmae came into the picture, Dad rented a boathouse every year for the whole of August, up at Lac Perdu, near Shawinigan. He spent the summer months growing a fat Hemingway moustache while the sun darkened his shoulders to the colour of beer. We weren't supposed to sleep at the boathouse, but in early August, when the concrete city had baked hard in the sun, Dad would drive us up to the lake on Friday nights. We'd light citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes off, eat rubbery pizza and drink warm juice out of the cooler. When the bats came out we'd go up into the woods to pee before going to sleep in a row on the boathouse floor, listening to the water lapping and Dad breathing in the dark.
On Sat.u.r.day mornings Dad sat in the boathouse attic typing up the poems that he carried in his head during the rest of the year. The poems were mainly about women once glimpsed through panes of frosted gla.s.s, because he was a mail carrier with two kids and that's about as close as he ever got. If you stood at the bottom of the ladder to the attic you could hear Dad up there groaning over lines about galoshes and garden paths, white terriers and white negligees, the day-long ning-nong of the bell and the endless wait for a snug fit in scented flesh.
While Dad worked at his poems, Jake and I squatted on the dock making fat duck-farting noises by blowing through blades of gra.s.s. Sometimes we would stir the water with sticks, or catch horseflies and hand-deliver them into the webs of spiders. Dad was in his confessional and we were being mostly good. Eventually Dad would climb back down the ladder, his skin smelling of hot pine boards and the edgy stench of the bats that lived behind the rafters, and then we would all swing off the rope on the tree and drop into the water.
I have this vision of Dad at the lake during the long summers, emerging from the waves, his chest hair plastered into dripping points. s.h.a.ggy Dad, Poseidon Dad, ever-strong Dad, and Jake and I screaming and clinging to him like monkeys while he dunked us up and down. And eventually he would say, "Clear off, I feel a poem coming on," and he would grab a couple of beers out of the cooler dug into the shallows and disappear up the ladder into the attic to write, while we sidled off to the cliffs to look for fossils.
Once we didn't clear off. Instead we dragged a ladder out of the gra.s.s and propped it up against the boathouse wall. Jake was just peering into the window at the top when a rotten rung of the ladder gave way and he fell and knocked himself out.
"Dad's got no clothes on and he's crying," he said when he woke up, by which time Dad was fully dressed and driving us into town as fast as he could.
It hadn't occurred to us that Dad might be unhappy because we weren't, and it was summertime, and Dad was just Dad. We knew he drank at night on the boathouse steps; the more beer he drank, the more bottles there were to get a refund on.
Just after we turned fourteen, Dad started dating Valmae, and that was the end of summers at the lake, because there was no plug at the boathouse for her hair dryer. Valmae was a secretary at our high school. She took it on to rescue Dad from the two giant squid choking him in their tentacled embrace. First she moved in and began cooking balanced meals, which in itself wasn't a bad thing, but then she persuaded Dad to give up mail delivery and open a dry-cleaning business. There was an office out back of the store where Valmae talked on the phone to tardy clients, threatening to send their suits and dresses to Colombia in a container ship if they did not come to collect them. Most companies don't bother to phone, she would say. My father pressed the trousers. The heat made his hair damp and curled it behind his ears. I worked the cash after school. I liked the punking noise the receipts made when you stuck them on the spike. Jake refused to have anything to do with it.
A couple of years after Dad hooked up with Valmae, Jake slipped the net and hitchhiked to Big Sur. Four years pa.s.sed and Valmae spotted him on a home-renovating show, making a plywood stereo cabinet on a suburban front lawn, satisfying women across North America with the kerthunk of his nail gun and the hiss and judder of the compressor. He was giving the camera his long, lazy grin and he had his ball cap at a howdy-pardner tilt. The dentist always said that Jake had too many teeth, but he had enough for television.
After Jake lit out I stayed on, typing out my angst one finger at a time on Dad's Olivetti in awful, badly s.p.a.ced rhyming verse about hideous misunderstandings and imagined perfect communion. After I had written each poem, I would shred it and let my geriatric gerbils make a nest of my thoughts.
I haven't spent my life looking for a mother, and I certainly haven't looked for one in Valmae. Valmae keeps her hair pretty. She sews sofa cushions. She is a wreath-of-dried-flowers-with-seasonal-bear-on-the-front-door kind of person. I haven't missed being mothered, but I'm kind of missing Dad. Valmae has him cornered like a bull, down on his Hemingway knees, helpless beneath the weight of house and car payments. Every day he's slapped by the coats on the electric rack at the dry cleaner's as they flare out and twirl around the corner. But he seems happy. I have to be honest about that. Maybe Dad has a good time between Valmae's satin sheets.
The other weekend I went out to buy a chair just like the one Dad used to sit on to write his poetry. Dad's chair had a woven seat made of some kind of hide, thick and yellow like old cooked pasta. We always thought of it as catgut since Dad emitted such excruciating yowls during his bouts of work. The chair had no screws in it-just wooden plugs, and when Dad stretched back, the chair creaked from the hip joint. Not a comfortable chair, but a speaking chair that moaned along with Dad's efforts to express himself. Of course we had to leave it behind in the boathouse with all the other stuff that was never ours.
I drove out across the plain toward St. Antoine, thinking of the time when it had been boreal forest, and how the rustling leaves must have roared in the wind, like the sea in the fall. My dog had her head out the pa.s.senger window. Flecks of saliva whipped off her tongue and stuck to the rear door. There never was a dog with so much saliva, or such perpetual antic.i.p.ation of the good to come.
The antique store was a real barn of a place, hung with moose heads and ancient egg beaters and leather pouches of oxidizing fish-hooks. Most of the furniture had been sc.r.a.ped and repainted, as if the years had not given it enough story, so story had to be added to it.
I asked about chairs and was directed upstairs to a stifling room under the rafters, filled with golden light that came through panels let into the ceiling. At one end were stacks of tables-end tables, side tables with barley-twist legs, dining-room tables, bedside tables with drawers, washstands-so many surfaces for putting down cups, saucers, books, typewriters and beer bottles. And there were hundreds of chairs spooning into each other: battered, sc.r.a.ped, loose-bottomed, straw-filled, hidebound chairs, which meant that there were also hundreds of lapsed poets, hundreds of adult children looking for lost fathers, and hundreds of family stories about stepmothers, which, when it came down to it, might not be so different one from another. The weight of all those chairs hanging among the rafters filled me with panic.
After Valmae came, there was none of the tangy essence of bat left about my father. The moist air of dry cleaning softened Dad's poems and turned them to powdery mould. And now Dad's going to marry Valmae, and after I've signed him over as a going concern I wonder when I'll be talking to him again, because it's his life now, and he's chosen to live like that, with her and her dried flowers. I just wish that Jake would slouch on in with his arms crossed over his chest and smile in his lazy summer-dog way, because I really want to take him out for a beer and ask him if he thinks that we somehow made Dad feel smothered when we clung on to him. I mean, when he dunked us in the water, did he ever wish that he could let us go? And now that we are twenty, has he at last let us go? And if he has, what is it like to tread water alone, without even a chair to hold onto when the spring floods come?
Among the Trees.
WHAT REMAINED OF Hugh had been delivered to Jan in a corrugated cardboard box, marked Temporary Container. Jan knew that Hugh would have been delighted, he would have positively roared with laughter at the aptness of the label, given that he had made it his life's work to celebrate the pa.s.sing of time. She held the box with both hands while she made her way uphill through the bare forest, her coat snagging on the dead branches of fallen spruce. Eventually she arrived at a high rock where the cliff fell away towards the lake in a jumble of boulders and moss and clinging cedars. Across the lake chilly banks of cloud lay along the hills, and the birches stood arrayed in white stripes against the cocoa brown and blue of the land. It was as good a place as any to do the scattering.
She opened the box for the first time and looked doubtfully at the granular presence in the plastic bag. It was not Hugh in that box. Hugh would never have had anything to do with a plastic bag, or a twist tie. Hugh was already out mingling with the other molecules in the air. He had always been everywhere and nowhere in particular.
Time to scatter, and she saw herself walking behind a plough, flinging seed in wide arcs. She could hear his gravelly voice, It may be the most useful work of art I ever create. Ashes are good for plants. Here darling, she said to him internally, try arranging this. She flung them out of the bag and they fell over the cliff edge not in a poetic swirl, but in a pattering shower like a fall of drops from a tree long after the rain has pa.s.sed.
Jan had been twenty-two when she inherited the antique log cabin on the edge of the great forest of the Mauricie. Her grandparents, tweedy Anglican folk with quiet voices and expensive shoes, had recognized that Jan alone of all the Toronto clan would not immediately sell the fishing camp at Lac Perdu in exchange for a manicured rock in Georgian Bay. There had been no animosity in the family when the bequest was revealed. As Hugh put it, Jan's family was territorially gifted, and there were enough properties of one kind or another to keep all the descendants happy.
Built by wealthy Americans in the late nineteenth century, the cedar-lined interior of the cabin had acquired a rich patina through repeated suffusions of sunlight, wood smoke and evening tobacco. Jan had studied alb.u.ms of minute snapshots of men and women in knickerbockers posing with their catches, while narrow-eyed local guides crouched in the background, sleeves rolled up to expose their hard, sun-darkened forearms. Jan had an interest in photography and an interest in history, and now she had inherited enough money to indulge in both.
About this time Hugh found Jan in the way a very young woman sometimes dreams of being found and trapped under the hot spotlight of a powerful regard. The art gallery had been full, the people arranged in small cl.u.s.ters in front of the paintings, gesturing with their wine gla.s.ses, some ignoring the paintings altogether and living only for the subtle readjustment of the room as each new person entered it. Jan was wearing the ruby silk that she had cut on the grain and the fabric swirled over her thighs. She feigned indifference to the stocky figure with his shorn white hair bristling like filaments, but at any time during the evening she could have told you exactly where "Hugh-the-sculptor" was to be found. A day later, a chance meeting at the liquor store and three bottles of Chilean red wine resulted in hours and whole days in bed and out of it, as their two bodies locked together and tumbled again and again off a high cliff into the warm air. Jan's life could not be the same afterwards. Hugh made the idea of answering the telephone in an art gallery seem like ridiculous work. Jan resigned from the job and began to take her photography seriously. She took Hugh off to spend the summer in the cabin in the woods.
At the beginning a great crowd of friends visited the cabin. Seated in a protective ring of citronella candles they ate berry compote off leaves and argued late into the night. When the mosquitoes became unbearable, they stripped and swam out along the drunken path of the moon. They were a mixed bunch, all happy to escape Toronto. Vernon Hasp, the film maker, and his girlfriend, Tiny, made the long drive across to Quebec in a convertible. Tiny brought bowls of the whipped tofu and lemon delight that she manufactured in great quant.i.ties and which, as Hugh said, trans.m.u.ted the contents of one's stomach to liquid gold. Zach Singer, the oboe player came, and he played while ageless Frederique Cyr danced, the humid air making a puddle of the mascara beneath her eyes. After supper, Gypsa McNider recited poetry in the clearing under the birches, her batwing sleeves arcing through the air as she declaimed that the amount of love in the world was constant. Her partner Tim lounged in the shadows rolling joints.
Hugh always sat well back in his chair, legs splayed, hands clasped over his stomach, arguing and drinking and drinking some more. He was a sculptor, and nature was his medium, for Hugh's art celebrated the transience of the day. He spoke of creating with the fundamental drive of a bee or a robin, but it was his personal mission to make manifest the pa.s.sage of time. A spy out before dawn might glimpse Hugh crouched close to the earth, aligning the cedar fronds on the path to the dock, so that they all pointed like arrows at a newly sprung toadstool capped in neon tangerine. Days later, the fronds would be discovered placed in concentric circles honouring the fall of the same toadstool, its head now pockmarked and saggy with spores. Hugh alone knew how to rearrange a cobweb with a needle, scratch fern fronds onto a clear sheet of ice. The sight of Hugh lying face down on the dock, herding the skipping silver slips of the water beetles into a corral made of reeds threaded together on a horse hair filled Jan with the desire to shout out loud at the magnificence of life. His mode of being challenged Jan's conservative roots and attracted her, held her, and she would not, could not stop giving him her love, for his art, for his vision, for his great arms and fists and for the gold cap on his tooth.
"Stay," she said to him. "Stay always. My forest is your forest, my woods are your woods, my leaves your leaves, my lake your lake, my streams your streams." She could remember the silly loving burble of words even now.
Once Hugh made Jan a stained gla.s.s window, pieced together out of slips of mica leaded with reeds, glued with pine sap, girded with willow. The window was an impossible gift, and theirs was an impossible relationship, and yet it had lasted. For twenty years, the summer colony in the woods had been a place of refuge for artists of all kinds. Hugh did not know, but after a gust of wind shattered the mica window, Jan had searched the forest floor for shards. She kept them in an envelope under a floorboard in the bedroom.
In the beginning, Jan had considered Hugh's renunciation of permanence to be a grand and free gesture, like the operatic trilling of the hermit thrush or a soprano practising in a neighbouring house. She had honoured his anger when he had discovered her photographing his work. Hugh had knocked the camera out of her hand into the ferns, where she later picked it up, unharmed. Get out, he'd said. Get out of her own place. Extraordinary to think of it now, like that. And afterward he knelt before her and soaked her wraparound skirt with his tears.
"Your spirit is wide, Jan, like the horizon," he said, stretching out his arms to receive her. So she forgave him, and with him she felt forgiven.
Sometimes Jan found it unbearable that Hugh should have seen her aging. She ought to have drifted in and out of his life like one of his time-limited sculptures, here at dawn, gone in the evening, with the last trilling of the hermit thrush. Now she saw herself standing in the cold forest with an empty cardboard box in her thin hands. Her hair is shorter now, and she keeps it dark by artificial means, but she knows it disappoints people to come across her from behind, to have her turn to face them with the ridged pools of sleeplessness beneath her eyes.
Just as once upon a time Hugh found Jan, so he eventually found Crispin, one summer night in a bar on the Main in Montreal. Crispin was quick, wiry, and witty. In another century, he might have been a velvet-clad poet relishing his dreams, but Crispin was a water-colourist, producing exquisite works of the old school. They sold well. Dreamy clouds are never easy to achieve, but Crispin had a knack for painting the wide sky of Quebec on fire in the evening or nacreous at first light. Crispin's skies caught at the emotions, hinted at spiritual depths, but remained guileless, because when it came down to it, they were just sky, just water-colour.
Jan still has a photograph of Crispin at that time, lithe Crispin wearing a black halterneck with diamantes that stretch in a glittering curve into the hollows of his armpits. Earlier in the day, they had pulled up the chains and anchors on the dock and had paddled off on it as if it were a raft. Crispin swam around in the water, his wet head coppery in the sunlight. For a while, they had all wanted him.
Jan had tried hard. She maintained outward appearances with meals and money, but somewhere she lost the knack of renewing her love for Hugh each day and she found herself acting more as she felt she ought to, rather than from desire. The parties in the woods changed. Vernon Hasp's doc.u.mentary about other men called Vernon Hasp attained cult status and he began to hold court in his own penthouse where he could see himself reflected in sixteen panes of gla.s.s at a time. Tiny drifted off to farm organic carrots. Frederique died from complications following a hip replacement. Their places were taken by Crispin's friends: students, actors, musicians shouting at each other about Derrida and hip hop. Hugh was often absent from Jan's bed in the morning, but the woods revealed little trace of his work.
Jan knew better than to say anything. Hugh had every right to live as he wished. Early on, she did her crying on a city bus, during one of those winters when she taught photography at a community college. The tears erupted when she least expected it, pouring out with all the shame and inevitability of vomit onto the sidewalk, while the high-school kids sitting around her sank into their jackets and looked out the window.
The next summer, when they returned to the woods, Jan slept in the cabin and Hugh shuttled between her room and Crispin's in the Bunkie. One morning when she was out taking photographs, she came across Crispin perched on a rock, brooding in the steam that rose off the lake into the cool morning.
"I do love him, you know," he said.
"You know nothing of love," she replied. That morning, she took a photograph of a reed bending backwards into its sharply angled reflection. Around it quivered the lines of the water. The illusion of flexibility recalled her desire to share her streams and woods with Hugh, but when she looked at the bent reed, she also remembered how hard it was to share Hugh.
Later in the day, she woke Hugh from a nap, sat on the edge of the bed, spread out her hands on her knees, placed her ultimatum before him.
"I'm not cooking any more," she said.
"I never said you had to."
"I don't want you sleeping in the cabin any more."
"I'll leave if you want me to, Jan."
"No, you must stay, but stay in the Bunkie. I'm not leaving you." It was all she had left to say. She could forgive Hugh for Crispin. Perhaps Hugh had discovered some great and good love in himself with Crispin that he had never experienced with her. She even told herself that she could stop desiring Hugh, if that was what he wanted, but she could not stop caring.
They did not see a couples therapist, but they did see an architect; "the architect of our separation," she called the rotund little man in his office tower of reflecting gla.s.s. They renamed the main cabin the "Ruche" or hive, and constructed a network of simple buildings, half hidden in the bedrock or up on stilts, with shutters that hid the windows, and ferns that grew upon the roof. Fireplaces and rock ledges jutted out into the sitting rooms, and the buildings were joined by walkways with holes cut in them to accommodate the growth of the trees.
Jan built herself a studio where she worked on her photographs with an intensity that surprised her. Her subjects were clouds, trees, reflections. She made photo essays of the barns and shrines in the rural community around the lake, but she rarely took pictures of people. The only face for her remained Hugh's. He had a half-smile of such infinite sweetness, made the sweeter by his capacity to withhold it. She marked every day of their separation with a photograph: ice in the reeds, the coal-bright sparks on the lichen stalks, the water droplets that filled the lichen goblets to the brim.
And so the years had pa.s.sed. During the summers, they lived in a scattered way among the trees, with Crispin, without Crispin, with Crispin again. And little by little Hugh's skin took on the transparency of age, and little by little, Jan's photographs became all the same. Up on the cliff top, with the empty container in her hand, Jan saw how she had lorded it over Hugh in her ownership of the paradise, and somewhere she had lost the natural line of herself, the line that swirled, was elastic and cut on the grain. Glorying in the idea of doing what she said she would do, she had given Hugh a place to stay, always, and in her stubbornness she had made chains for them both.
She had done what she said she would do. She had shared. By G.o.d, she shared everything that she had, and now when she finally had it all to herself, the wind lifting the roof in the old cabin, the rattle of flies against the gla.s.s in the studio, she found that she did not want it.
Perhaps Hugh had been right in his insistence that there should be nothing left to mark his pa.s.sage in the world: no child, no artwork, no monument, nothing. Let the cabin and the studio on stilts fall into a careless teepee of boards in the forest, and beneath it a stained kapok mattress, its sodden insides spilling out into the leaf mould. Maybe there is no virtue, after all, in doing what you said you were going to do. Gone were the days of Frederique lifting her chiffon scarves to the poplars. Jan shrugged. Now Hugh was gone too, and what was the point of holding on to anything? The time had come to pull her resentment out of herself, this anchor of hatred and love, and the gobbet of flesh that it was attached to. Up came the cable, dripping and straining, encrusted with zebra mussels and streaming weed. Mentally she flung it off the cliff after the ashes, left it to coil like a dead snake caught in a cedar tree.
Jan turned away from the cliff's edge and started back down the track. Out of habit she caught herself observing the funneled spider webs and the woodp.e.c.k.e.r holes, the flaps of lichen attached to the rock faces. It was November 20th, 2003 and Hugh had begun his pa.s.sage into the ground, but she had no camera, no way to mark this day. Tomorrow the day would be gone. And now the tears came, for there was no other pair of eyes to see, to verify or to contradict her version of the vision. He was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d to have left her so alone.
Jan reached the bottom of the hill. In the distance, she could see the huddle of men beside the cars strung out along the road. Crispin was in the middle of the group, no longer young, but preserved by the pa.s.sage of good scotch and regular exercise. Four young friends stood about, their beards groomed into neat pubic triangles. Hugh had been in thrall to them, more so than ever towards the end, trapped by loneliness and the camaraderie of rough young s.e.x in tree houses.
The men looked at the cold sky and at the cold land, their hands thrust deep into their jacket pockets. Then they turned to look at her, expectant.
"Well, he's out there," she said, showing them the empty container. She waited for Crispin to speak. Now it was time to see what Crispin would make of the scattered remains of Hugh's love.
"G.o.d, I'm so very sorry," said Crispin, breathing in deeply and covering his face.
She stood looking at the backs of Crispin's hands, reddened and dry with cold, asparkle with short golden hairs. What was Crispin to her now? He was certainly not a son, or a brother, but some other relation-a step-partner, from whom she expected nothing, and to whom she owed nothing. And yet, she thought, it was true, she had also pa.s.sed a life of sorts with Crispin.
Hugh was gone, but nothing was finished. Together they had built a colony, and the history of a colony is filled with coming, and going, and coming back again. The words came out of Jan before she could stop them.
"Stay," she said to Crispin. "Stay. Invite your friends. There's plenty of vegetable soup in the pot." Her mouth stretched sideways in an elastic line, and there was a give in it that she had forgotten.
Crispin took his hands away from his face and reached out to touch her forearm. His eyes appeared paler than ever now that he had taken to bleaching his hair.
"Thanks for the offer Jan," he said, "you've been a sweetie. But I think we'll head back into town. Mike has a gig tonight. Don't you Mike?"
A young man in black leather nodded, jingling his car keys.
"Right," said Jan. "Well. Come up whenever you feel like it." She turned away, holding herself rigid against the cold. Crispin stopped her as she was unlocking the car.
"Jan," he said, "Hugh stayed because he wanted to."
Jan spent the night at the cabin. She did not light the fire and she did not heat the soup. Instead she coc.o.o.ned in the duvet and lay listening to the scuffle and twitter of mice in the walls. In the night the first snows came, and when she awoke she looked out at the fir trees and their green fingers, now outlined in white, spread wide and ready to bless. So that was it, she thought, the final benediction. She was forty-four, and free to go.
Salsa Madre.
Photographs and translation by Jan McDonald.
COME ON IN, don't be shy. My name is Bernadette. And you are? Jan. So pleased to meet you, Jan. Father Rene told me that you would stop by. Yes, I always work out here under the carport. I like the sound of rain falling on the roof. You're from Montreal? Toronto. Ah. That's a long way. I have a niece who lives there, on Yonge Street. Twins in a stroller, maybe you have seen her? They're a handful of trouble. Well, this is my summer project-should be finished in the next day or two. Sure, photos are fine. You might find the ground more stable for your tripod over on the path.
These are my tiles and pots and cups, arranged by colour. I do the actual smashing on the concrete, and I shape the pieces afterwards with nippers. I use an outdoors glue to fix the ceramic on the tub. Here's a nice piece of Limoges that Madame Benoit pa.s.sed on to me. Look at the pink dress on that courtly lady, but see how it's cracked underneath? There's gold paint on it. I'll be using it somewhere special.
Today I prayed that the paint inside my shrine would stay put. I will not be ashamed to ask for that in the church, since my work is to glorify the Mother of Our Lord, so the paint should not flake no matter what I do. Not to say you shouldn't prime carefully. After all, our G.o.d is a busy G.o.d. I've seen shrines where the sun gets in and the paint hangs down in sheets around the head of the Holy Mother. She stands there as if she had her head up under a string of washing. Shame.
Mind you, not many people bother to keep up their shrines any more, and I don't know that you're going to find anything other than empty ones around here. These days people prefer deer on their lawns, or roosters or kids fishing. Down on Rue Bonaventure someone has an Olympic Stadium being attacked by a giant polar bear. Not many people feel that much faith any more, or if they do, they keep it in their pockets and not in their gardens, except at Christmas, and then it's the plastic figurines. Violette La Caisse bought an entire set on sale at the hardware store and they faded after two years. You can't make holy things out of plastic.
I've been doing ceramic stars on my bathtub, rays or petals of one colour and centres of another. I stick them on first, and then I fill in the gaps with little bits left over. Mother Mary approves of recycling. She gave birth in a barn, after all, even though where she is now she probably has most things in gold and jasper. I gave her a good clean this morning. She looks nice lying on the gra.s.s, doesn't She? Resting. Just like my mother used to have a little siesta after lunch.
I expect Father Rene told you that I was once a novice. I was about to take my vows when G.o.d came to me in a dream. He said go to the general store, so I did. I was so shy! The store was nothing like the supermarkets we have now. You could get anything there. Violette La Caisse was the cashier that day. Urgel Beauregard from up Lac des Tortues way came in. I didn't know him from Adam, but I heard him say to Violette that his wife had died and would she have him, because he had six children and didn't know what he would do. And Violette said thanks for offering, but she had enough on her hands with the rush on sugar pie orders, and she turned to serve me and I looked up at Urgel's big empty eyes. He drove a truck for the paper mill, and I brought up all those children in this house and we had two more of our own. Good kids. They all pitched in.
Now I'm going to tell you what happened to my son Henri. It's nothing you won't hear from down the road. Still, I'd rather tell you in my own words. People say that divorce is the worst thing that can happen to a family, but there are worse things. It's the same with families as it is with ceramic. You don't quite know how the tile will crack, even if you think you have a rough idea. I'm talking hairline cracks, places where it's ready to break and we can't tell until the hammer comes down. Well, whatever went on used to happen in the vestry. And in the end my boy Henri got so quiet I knew something was up. He was not the only one. And next thing they sent that priest to the South of France so that he could do it all over again in the sun.
When Henri turned sixteen, he went to work in his uncle's fish shop in Montreal. Plenty of boys do it. I suppose they think there's more to life down there. Hard to imagine, isn't it? When we have all this sky up here. But at least he told me he was going-he could have gone to do squeegee like that kid down the road. I left him alone. You have to let people work things out, but I never stopped wondering how he was, and I never stopped praying for him. He was a good kid.
You know, about this time last year the Virgin Mary appeared to me behind the barn. I was spraying the lettuces with a slug killer that I make by boiling up cigarette b.u.t.ts. It works a charm. Well, all of a sudden I had this feeling that there was a mystery happening beyond the edge of the vegetable patch. And I came around the corner of the barn, and there She was, hovering over the lightning weed. Just small, like a figurine, but shimmering. And she said to me in a voice as low as a mourning dove's, Find what was lost, renew what has been broken, give the thanks that is due. I fell down to my knees and I cried and I cried.
Well, what can you do when the Holy Mother calls? I went to Montreal on the bus and stayed with my cousin's friend Rosalia. She lives near the Jean Talon market. So beautiful this market, with the fruit laid out in the shops-pink carrots, pink! There are organic bananas spooning to the left, aubergines spooning to the right, and p.r.i.c.kly fruits from Asian countries that I don't even know the name of. I bought a lot of tomatoes for only five dollars, and Rosalia and I spent all afternoon making a sauce called salsa madre, which is very good and has more garlic in it than Urgel would ever let me use at home. I had no problem discovering where Henri was living. He has an apartment in the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, only now it's condos. Early in the morning I sat in the band rotunda in the park, and I saw them come out of the door, my Henri, and a little boy, and another man.
The boy sat on Henri's shoulders and held onto his ears for balance. Henri's friend held the door open for them, shut it carefully behind them. The urge to get up and run to them, G.o.d help me, it was so strong. My feet were rising off the ground, but I held onto the railings with both hands. I watched them walk all the way down the street to the car, a nice car. Then I went back to Rosalia's and got the jars of salsa madre, and then I returned to the church that is now condos. A young man with a ponytail let me into the building. He had a T-shirt on that said "Don't shut me in." I looked at him and said with my eyes, "Don't shut me out," and he opened the door, just like that.
Inside, you can't imagine what they have done to the Church of Our Lady. They have built a hotel in there, and left one pew to sit on while you wait for the elevator. Where there should be a stoup, just inside the door, there is a water cooler. And where the Cardinal walked on marble flagstones in 1961, there is carpet and a corridor. Well I've done the same thing in the other direction, me out here turning my bathtub into a sacred place. We're all going in one direction or another, and who's to say it won't become a church again in a hundred years? Likewise, if you needed a bathtub, you could come and dig up one of those empty shrines from down the road.
From Henri's apartment on the fifth floor you can see the whole city. A young woman was there, doing the cleaning. Such a tiny girl from some Asian country. She could see I was his mother, and she showed me right in. Oh, you have never seen such an apartment! So tidy, so calm, like a monastery, with slanted windows high in the ceiling, and a shining aluminum refrigerator, and a bedroom up a spiral staircase. I delivered my jars of salsa madre, and the girl stood on a chair and put them in an empty cupboard high up, and we lined up the jars just so and closed the doors. Henri will find them on a hungry day, a day when he cannot think what to cook, and he can use that sauce with the vegetables that he might already have.
So that was it. I came home. I don't like Montreal. Too much concrete. But at least I know that he is living in the house and heart of Our Lady, and he is safe. And I am glad, and grateful for Prayers Answered. And so I wait, in case Henri wants to bring that child home to meet his grandmother, because that is the next thing that I will pray for, as I pray for the man who held the door open, and the mother of the child, too, whoever she is. I will wait and watch for Henri to come in his own time, same as I wait for the deer to come out of the forest to eat the new shoots on the field. And then, what a feast we will have.
Look, Jan-I am ready for the coulis. What is the word for coulis in English? Yes, grout. The colour of this grout is called paprika, which will spice up all that blue and make the yellow bright in the rain. So we mix up the coulis with water, until it's thick and sloppy like icing, and then we work it on with a spatula, like this, into the cracks, and then sc.r.a.ping off the excess, and then doing it again. Here we go. And now we give a good polish with our cloth, et voila, the colours come together and my bath becomes a shrine fit for Our Lady of Lowing Cows, Our Lady of Melt.w.a.ter, Our Lady of Lightning Weed, Our Lady of Blackened Shingles, Our Lady of the Smelter, Our Lady of Everywhere.
Without the coulis, the broken cups and saucers are just that, broken. And without the ceramic, the coulis is just wet earth. But put both together, and they glow. The coulis is love. We cannot do without it. You have kids, Jan? Just your books of photographs? Well, it's all for the glory. Will you listen to that blackbird? He's up there every evening. Let me wash my hands and I'll make you some coffee. You won't find a better cup down the road.
Champlain's Astrolabe.
FUELLED BY A COFFEE of mythic proportions, Brian Armstrong drove eastwards from Toronto in a mood so foul it made his flesh cold and his armpits sweat. Brian hated site visits in Quebec. Why couldn't Irwin have sent him to photograph the Bahamas project instead? Beyond Montreal there must have been a hundred groundhogs perched on their burrows in the weak spring sunshine or squashed along the sandy shoulders of the road. Brian would have liked to wrap up a few of the riper ones and courier them back to Irwin as a present. Still, in the car he at least felt safe from the hovering clouds of French vowels that swirled in the air outside. The deeper he got into the province, the more roly-poly the French accent would become and the less likely it was that he would ever understand a word of it. Men, women and children: a whole province-full of people talking through a mouthful of steel wool. The main thing was not to stop until he got to the site at Lac Yahoo.
Irwin had a.s.sured Brian that the client was an English-speaking photographer from Ontario with a vacation home in Quebec. She wanted an organic look for her new buildings, so there would be trees to save, which he knew Brian would appreciate. Brian cared less for the trees than Irwin realized. Brian was hoping for a small-waisted, red-maned, green-eyed, fearless photographer. And not just a photographer, but a pilot too, or better still, a trapeze artist. Evidently she was a friend of Vernon Hasp, the film director. Not that Brian ever got invited to those parties. He never went anywhere. Not strictly true. Shortly after the divorce he had visited a resort where he had eaten a bad mussel. He had returned to find his electricity bills strangely elevated because Kelvin had installed a small grow op in the bas.e.m.e.nt.
Kelvin had always been a question-mark kid. Whenever Brian thought about what to do with him, his mind developed black and white static like an old television. The boy might be awake by now, lounging in his chair in the half-light, prisms reflected off the computer screen jiggling their way across the lenses of his gla.s.ses. Kelvin was all caught up in some kind of game. He said he had h.o.a.rds of imaginary charm, plenty of character and wealth stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt computer. Kelvin had lately turned twenty-one but the bas.e.m.e.nt still smelt of socks and apple cores.
Spring rain began to fall and Brian turned on the windshield wipers, found a Vermont radio station and got into the rhythm of the road. He noted a host of white birds feeding in a drowned field beside the river and even found himself able to appreciate the rumpled heads of the nut-brown pampas gra.s.s and the barrow-shaped clumps of sumac. Every stalk and bole was tinged with the green-gold of spring sap rising. And as for the billboards advertising local bars, each was a teenager's dream, dominated by a pair of bronzed G.o.ddesses coiled around poles, fully trained in the slithery arts of Bourbon Street and just waiting to entertain the weary trucker or the lonely man from the architectural firm in his c.r.a.ppy car.
For a few kilometres Brian returned to one of his favourite fantasies: a willing woman in a dry sugar shack with a clean floor and no cobwebs. What such a woman would be doing in a sugar shack this late in the season Brian was not sure, but it did not matter. The stickiness and the sweetness were all.
After the rain stopped the margins of the sky lay fringed and ragged with mist along the tops of the birch forest. By his calculations, Brian was not far off from the artists' colony at Lac Whoozie, but the mega-coffee weighed heavily in his bladder. He pulled off onto a side road for four-wheelers. No need to risk going into a cafe. A quick whiz in the woods and he could be back on the road. He tucked his wallet out of sight, pressed the b.u.t.ton to lock the door and shut it firmly. It would be a disaster if the camera were stolen.
A ditch full of pampas gra.s.s and a low wire fence lay between him and the woods. He made an awkward leap and got across with only one boot soaked. He stepped over the fence, ducked in behind the trees and stood looking up through the branches as if he had never met himself, while he listened to the stream and sputter on the damp layers of foliage at his feet.
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