LOUISA BLAIR

NEARERTHANTHEEYE A Novella

MélTIoire présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures de l'Université Laval dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en littératures d'expressions anglaise pour l'obtention du grade de lTIaîtrise ès art (M.A.)

DEPARTEMENT DES LITTÉRATURES, FACULTÉ DES LETTRES UNIVERSITÉ LA VAL QUÉBEC

2009

© Louisa Blair, 2009 11

ABSTRACT Blair, Louisa, MA, Université Laval, 2009. "Nearer Than the Eye: A Novella." Professors Neil Bissoondath and Elspeth Tulloch.

Set in Quebec City, "Nearer Than the Eye" is a novella (147 pages) about an anglophone- francophone family in the 1990s. The protagonist is a religious woman who sees angels about town and speaks to a relic in her pocket. She has her worries: her sister is a drug addi,ct and her daughter has quit school and is plunging into a world of sex and drugs. The protagonist blames herselfbecause of a secret from her past with which she has not yet made peace. An accompanying essay discusses how Quebecois religious culture and the Roman Catholic faith influence this work of fiction. Referring to Flannery O 'Connor's Wis e Blood and her essays on Catholic fiction, thi s essay identifies elements of the Catholic imagination in our novellas. Elements of the grotesque and l11agic realism are also discussed along with their links to Catholic theology.

RÉSUMÉ « N earer Than the Eye» est un court roman (14 7 pages) en anglais dont le sujet est une famille québécoise anglo-francophone demeurant à Québec pendant les années 1990. Une mère dévote a des visions d 'anges et dialogue avec une relique qu'elle porte dans sa poche, tout en s'inquiètant de sa soeur toxicomane et de sa fille qui sombre dans un monde de sexe et de la drogue. La femme s'en culpabilise à cause d'un secret enfoui dans son passé, avec lequel elle n'a pas encore fait la paix. En deuxièl11e partie, une dissertation commente la façon dont la culture religieuse québécoise etla foi catholique influencent mon écrüure en comparant mon roman avec Wise Blood de Flannery O'Connor, notal11111ent en examinant sa pensée sur la fiction catholique. Je fais référence aux élélllents de la grotesque et du réalisme l11agique applicables aux deux ouvrages, tout en faisant un lien avec la théologie catholique. 111

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

1 would like to thank my director Neil Bissoondath and my co-director Elspeth Tulloch for their help and support. Thanks to ll1y sister Sarah Blair-Lewis who is why 1 started telling stories in the first place, and my l110ther Miria1Jl Blair for her creative company every Thursday in her attic. Thanks to my daughter Miriam and my partner Don for their unfailing beliefin me.

This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Dan Phelan, SJ. lV

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page Abstract (English and French) ...... ii

Acknowledgements ...... iii

Part 1: "Nearer Than the Eye," a Novella ...... ]

Chapter ] : Hair ...... 2

Chapter 2: Snow ...... 10

Chapter 3: Bones ...... 24

Chapter 4: Ice ...... 40

Chapter 5: FI esh ...... 46

Chapter 6: Death ...... 56

Chapter 7: Dust...... 70

Chapter 8: BJood ...... 78

Chapter 9: Feet...... 88

Chapter 10: Sweat...... 105

Chapter ] ]: Wings ...... 1] 4

Chapter 12: Earth ...... 137

Part II: "Passing by the Dragon": An Analysis of the Influence of Faith and Religious Culture in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and Louisa Blair's "Nearer Than the Eye"...... 148

Works Cited ...... 193 PARTI

NEARER THAN THE EYE

A Novella by Louisa Blair 2

Chapter l

Hair

Maude was surrounded by mirrors. Lights reflected off lights reflected off lights. Girls in

black circled quietly through the room, brandishing scissors and plastic spray bottles or

thrusting them into their studded leather belts. They leaned solicitously over one customer

after another, touching them, transforming thenl, fixing them, tidying them, alchemists in a

human laboratory. The girl in black behind Maude brought her face frighteningly close to

the face of a man in a red chair and with brisk delicacy clipped off the hairs coming out of

his nostrils. Maude turned away from the mirror. So businesslike, so intimate.

Her own face stared into itself, studying what had becollle ofheL She'd always

hoped her wrinkles would take the form ofpermanent slllile-lines as she aged, as they did

with SOllle women: happy, polite, peaceful WOI11en. Age had fixed her own face into a deep

grimace, her lips were lumpy and bluish, her eyes were too small. But her temples were still pink and innocent, somehow, permanently blushing.

Her green silk shirt would look nice once her hair was properly red again with blonde highlights. Mèches as they called theIll in French, candlewicks. She'd be as brightly lit as a Christmas tree, and aIl that colour and light wouTd distract people from her face.

Although, she adIllitted, who else reaIly cared what her face looked like? Not Reggie, he barely looked at her, and as far as Violet was concerned, Maude was already beyond the edge of the known world when it came to looks. Poor child, a teenager with a mother who looks like her grandmother.

The girl-in-black who was looking after Maude's head caIlle from Matane, she'd told Maude. Her mother, probably halfMaude's age, worked in the fishplant. Maude felt a 3

flicker of worry as she wondered what sort of hairstyles fishplant workers favoured as a

rule. So garish they held your eye even through the stench of fish. Highlights so bright you

could see them through the hygienic haircaps.

Her scalp prickled ominously and she looked around for the girl from Matane. If she

didn't get back in time the chenlicals she'd pasted onto Maude's head would eat into it and

she'd end up scalped, just like Jean de Brébeuf. What does Brébeufthink, she wondered,

about les Québécoises d 'aujourd'hui, who voluntarily submit to these chemical mutilations

for the sake of eternal youth?

Maude in middle age had resigned herselfto lifelong celibacy. Her nlethod had been

to look in the mirror, smile, and say "Spinster!" in a friendly way to herself every day for a

year until she'd accepted it. But when she was nearly 50 she met Reggie and got man~ied

and had a miracle child. It was that that made her start dyeing her hair, when Violet was

SIX.

"Y ou with a six-year old!" a hairdresser had said, after cutting her grey hair. "Y ou

can 't go round Iooking Iike that!" And instead of smacking the girl for her insolence,

Maude had meekly joined the ranks of the retired redheads. Quebec women religiously dyed their hair bright red as soon as a grey hair appeared. Perhaps an unconscious tribute to aIl our Irish grandmothers, she thought. But her own hair had been red, and not only her grandmother but her mother had been Quebec Irish. So she had a better excuse than most, she felt.

Brébeuf wouldn 't be surprised at aIl. The Huron, among whom Brébeuf had lived in the seventeenth century, did dangerous things to theIllselves for the sake ofbeauty too.

People have been cutting thel11selves, tattooing themselves, dyeing and piercing and scarring themselves for the sake ofbeauty for thousands ofyears. Her girl from Matane had 4

a tiny dial110nd embedded in her lower lip. The other night at supper, Violet had threatened to get her tongue split. The thought made Maude feel sick, but she suspected Violet said it just to provoke her father into making a lot of noise, and it worked. Maude hadn 't had time to ask her about the particular appeal of a split ton gue before Reggie and Violet were shrieking accusations of deliquency and anal retention at each other.

Maude was sure that Huron youth never accused their eIders of anal retention, but then there was a lot those Jesuits never told people about what the Huron really did. Abbé

Honnidas had told her that the Jesuit Relations, the founding documents of the nation, were nothing but begging letters to France for money to keep their mission to the heathen going.

Like those letters you get at Christmas from charities telling you what marvellous things they are doing for the po or with your money, and that they need more, please, and bribing you with a few stickers that, miraculously, bear your own address.

That Matane girl had bettet get back here, Maude thought anxiously, 100king at the terraces of folded silver foil cascading down the sides of her head. It was tempting to just

\valk out like this into the street, with the silver foil on, go into W. E. Bégin the butcher' s on Saint-Jean Street and casually offer him a sheet or two off her head to wrap up the filet de porc she would take hOl11e for supper. Beyond her in the mirror she could see a young man wearing what looked like a plastic shopping bag on his newly platinum-blonde head.

Several halo-sized hoops circled above hi m, whirring gently, like l1100ns orbiting a planet.

Beyond hÏ111 a brown dog was curled up in the corner in a nest of drifted hair.

Maude frowned. She sometimes saw things that that other people didn 't seelll to see, but she didn 't dare ask the platinum-blonde J11an if he could see a dog in the corner. When she turned to look at the dog, not through the ll1irror this time, it was still there. Perhaps it was

St. Roch's dog. The one who brought hinl bread every day when he was dying of the Black 5

Death in Italy, saving his life. A dog so noble would surely also be a saint. Was

somebody's life about to need saving? She hoped not. She didn't like ambulances or

anything resembling an emergency. She stared at the dog through the mirror again, trying to

discem the nature of its corporeality, until it raised its head and whined in confusion.

"Sorry," muttered Maude, tuming her eyes away. How humbling that even through

mirrors animaIs can sense someone's eyes on them, even animaIs from other worIds.

"Shut up, you lnongrel," said the Matane girl to the dog as she hurried back to

Maude carrying a mixing bowl with a paintbrush and something brown and sticky in it.

Maude was relieved; the girl could see the dog too. The girl started fiddling with the tinfoil

and Maude felt a frisson of pleasure at the crinkly noise and the feeling of someone doing

knowledgeable things to her head. Taking care ofher. She shut her eyes and basked in the

bright Iights filtering through her eyelids and the smell of perfumed chelnicals.

"Your grandson, madame?"

Maude opened her eyes. The dog in the mirror was standing up wagging its tail, and

TOIn, her sister Cannen 's son, was patting it and imitating the httle groans of happiness the

dog was making.

"TOIn!" she said. "Don 't go up to a strange dog. 1t could bite you."

"Sorry Maudie," said Tom cheerfully. He was an undemourished nine-yea~-old with a ruthless crewcut and a pale little triangular face that Jflevertheless shone with a kind of grubby lUlninosity. She' d never known a child to ask so Inany questions. And wel1 he

Inight, with a father a thousand ki 10lnetres away and a mother who was a crack addict. But he never asked those particu]ar questions.

"Where' s your moth~r?" 6

"She had to get her hair done before she goes back to the hospital, so she dropped me here."

"How did she know l was here?"

"Y ou told her."

Typical - Carmen dumping her son with Maude at one hairdresser so she could go to another. Carmen had a hairdresser in the Lower Town whom she'd met in detox and she claimed he knew exactly what she wanted. Why couldn't Tom be there too? Maude didn't want to think about it. He should have been at school, but Carmen didn 't think it necessary.

She'd read sorne books about home schooling and thought that's what she was doing, even though she wasn't at home to do it most of the time. "He'lllearn to read when he feels like it," she'd say. She hadn 't noticed that he'd already leamed, long ago. Mostly from Violet's shelves and shelves of cartoon books.

Tom glanced in the mirror, fro.wned, took off his cap, squeezed its peak between his hands to round il a little more, then put it back on. Satisfaction briefly smoothed out his pinched face when he regarded that rounded peak.

"What have you been up to, Tommie?" Maude asked.

"Nothing," said T0111, tuming fronl the l11irror and smiling radiantly at her. "Reading

Violet's magazines with her, at your house, but then she had to go to work. She let me borrow sonle ofthel11. What's a condom?"

"We'll talk about that later," said Maude sharply. And now it came flooding back to her. It was amazing how good she was at blocking out thoughts, when she was alone with thel11. She could pretend these things weren 't happening. Where was her Violet, that young wide-eyed girl who wanted to be read to, to help with the housework, to draw and sing, to listen to stories about the saints, to say the rosary when she had nightmares? She 7

had suddenly exploded and been replaced by sorne new person in a new body. While

Maude's own curves were tuming into lumpy flesh held vaguely in place by sacks of

stretched skin that was developing a pocked, pizza-dough texture, her daughter's sweet

angularity had suddenly fi11ed out, almost ovemight, into luscious nubility, a11 primed and

ready for procreation. And the new body wasn 'tjust a body. This was a new person who

didn 't want to be with her parents anymore, who had secrets, who was rude, whose interests

were private and dangerous. Maude found herself getting unreasonably angry at being shut

out like that. She'd never known herse]f so angry.

"Don't worry, Mum, we're just hormonal," Violet had said one day after a fight

over what time it was reasonable to come honle on a school night. She was speaking for

both of them. That was before Violet left school altogether. That was when she was still

speaking to her mother, once in a while, sharing a joke. Perhaps that had been the last one

ever. Jean de Brébeuf, pray for us and our hormones, she breathed, but then cast about in

her mind for someone who'd know more about them. Jean de Brébeufmight know about

how to bung up a leaky canoe with pine sap, but perhaps not much about WO]l1en and their

honllones. But there was alwaysMartha frO]l1 the New Testament, angry and jealous ofher

sister Nlary. Was Maude jealous of her daughter's youth? She darted a quick look into her

feelings to catch herself unawares, SOIlle glÏlllpse of jealousy, the whisk of a tail as it

disappeared into a mouse hole. Probably there all right, but now it's hidden again. There

was always the grumpy Prodigal eIder brother. There was a whole string of people whose

angry ]110]l1ents had filtered into the Bible and been immortalized, thank God.

She looked at Tom, who lay with his head on the dog's flank, fingering its soft brown ear with one hand and sucking his thumb. The dog paid not a blind bit of attention. 8

The Matane woman was running her hand through Maude's hair and looking at it appraisingly in the mirroL She appeared to like what she saw. Maude had given up being afraid of what it would look like. It looked like shite, as her mother would have said. Oh well, more grist for the humility mlll.

"How does it look from behind?" she asked. She just wanted the girl to keep her hands in her hair. The girl got a mirror and held it up behind her head. It looked like shite there too.

"C'est parfait?" the girl said.

"Oui, parfait. l guess we']J go home now," said Maude drowsily. "On y va, boy.

Home."

"Ohhh" said Tom. "But l love this doggie. Why don't you get a dog?"

"We don 't have room. Who' d take it..for walks?"

"Me and Violet would. Oh, yes, l forgot to tell you, we were listening to the radio, and a big truck came and brought something for you," said Tom. "We had to help the man bring it into the house. It was huge."

"What sort of something?" said Maude.

"A huge boxy thing. It looked old. It would be perfect for the dog to sIeep in."

"How big?"

"About as big as a horse," said Tom.

"A big or a little horse?"

"A Shetland pony."

"How intriguing."

"Let's go hOlne and open it Aunt Maudie!"

"1 '111 dropping you off at school, my boy." 9

"Okay." Tom loved schooI, second only to being with his cousin Violet.

The Matane girl had smeared sorne gel on her hands and was using it to bouffe up

Maude's hair one last tÎ111e. l guess for the ten-minute walk between the hairdresser and the fishplant l' d look good, thought Maude. Perhaps that box was full of frozen fish from

Matane that Reggie had forgotten he ' d ordered. 10

Chapter 2

Snow

From upstairs Violet heard a skateboard roaring down the road. She knew who it was but couldn 't see him from up on the third fioor under the eaves. The wind whistled through the cracks between the windows and their frames, sucking at the silver paper that her father had stapled to the ceiling for added insulation, making it heave eerily like an animal 's flanks. Her Munsch poster of "The Scream" gave a shudder.

Tonight she would sneak out after dark and go down to watch him again at

Place d 'Youville. It was probably the last chance to skateboard - they only had a few days left before the city tumed the square into a skating rink, and a few flakes of snow were falling already. He was the best: he could jump up the set of steps to the bandstand and slide back down the rails (greased with the bar of soap he al ways carried in his pocket) and land without fal1ing, and sometimes at that moment he

100ked up and saw her, as ifhe could feel her watching or perhaps, if it was a good landing, just hoping she was.

Violet combed her long black hair, tearing at the knots and thinking about her mother, her jailer. She tried to imagine her not as her mother, but as someone her own age. Even in pictures of her as a young woman, with a11 her brothers and sisters standing out in front of their little house, bits of broken fann machinery clustered around the uncles and aunts, her mother was always holding the youngest baby, her Il

youngest brother or sister. Always ITIotherlike. A bit Iike me now, she thought, purlling a tangled Ioop ofhair out of the comb.

Her mother didn 't be1ieve in conditioner, so Violet had to buy her own, and right now clothes were winning out over "lotions and potions," as her mother called them. She sat on her bed and stared into the mirror on her dressing table, frowning as she looked at the long narrow face. Far too long and narrow. Lips too huge and babyish, and always getting chapped and bloody. Even the most devoted Goth might balk at kissing bleeding lips, however man y skulls and daggers were tattooed on his own biceps. Her pale skin and big baleful eyes were suitably gothic, and after supper she planned to add sorne mascara and eyeliner. Had her mother ever worried about what she Iooked like? You certainly couIdn't tell now. She'd totally let herself go, except for that awful hair thing she did. Never even looked in darkened shopwindows to check herself out. Or perhaps just not in front of Violet, not wanting to encourage the sin of vanÜy.

When Violet went down to the front room her mother was on the phone. Her flecked red hair in curlers, wearing a crumpled green silk shirt with a glop of sauce down the front, she looked like the peonies in the backyard. PetaIs dripping and dropping. Her ITIottled forehead glimnlered with intensity but the tone of voice lightened when she saw Violet, and she looked up and smiled. Violet rolled her eyes and walked stiffly past into the kitchen. She recognized the reddish goop that bubbled in a pot on the stove as the SaITIe stuffthat was on her mother's shirt. She stirred it, 100king out of the window impatiently. A whole week! Just for a packet of condoms. Okay there were two missing, but her mother should be grateful her daughter was so sensible. Her mother's ideas belonged to a different world. 12

It was nearly dark. The topmost branches of the elm trees out back were beginning to jostle in the wind. SOlne children in the next yard were throwing sand at each other and laughing. Violet knew them. She knew who would get hurt and who would get in trouble and who would get off scqt free. She tumed back to the goop.

After a silent supper, Violet cleared the table and went upstairs. Her father was staying out late again, the usuallame excuse about staff meetings. Families aren 't meant to be like this, she thought. When will it go back to the way it used to be? Since she' d been grounded she tried to interpret the silence as pun ishnlent, punishment for quitting school, punishment for the condoms. But she knew it wasn 't even that. They had each gone away, she and each ofher parents, into themselves. She stayed by the window as night feU , listening to the pock pock of a tennis match her mother was watching downstairs, and a commentator who sounded like Woody Allen. Perhaps l've changed, she thought, and perhaps she's given up on me. Perhaps it'll never be the same again. As for her father - whenever he was home he climbed up to the attic and sat there on his own with his pipe, blowing smoke out through the tiny dormer window in the roof. She needed to get out, right now.

Finally Woody Allen shut up, and her mother ventured into Violet's room on her way to bed.

"Goodnight, ma chérie" she said, as if everything were normal.

"Yeah right," Violet said, without tuming around. Her mother left the rOOln with a small sigh. From her window, Violet watched the reflections in the house opposite to see when her mother tumed"her light out. 13

Then she left the house through her bedroom window.

She threw her boots down into the backyard first, and drew in her breath as she heard a yowl - her nl0ther had forgotten to let the cat in, and it' d just been struck. A story about why her boot had fallen out of the window began to form in her head. But her mother couldn 't have heard a thing, the light stayed off.

She backed carefully out through the window, legs first. She clung to the sil] while her stockinged feet searched for the roof ladder, permanently fixed there to help the chimney sweeps. Once down the ladder she scuttled sideways along the gutter, her hands flat against the slope of the wet tin roof, to the drainpipe. Her feet were already soaked, and her hands cold. Getting a firm grip on the drainpipe was the worst part. Even her stomach had to grip with aIl it was worth, her black US

ARMY hoody had ridden up and with a bare midriff, it hurt. But the rusty iron bands that fixed the drainpipe against the wall held firm.

When she was young and they lived on the farm, she had learned to climb on the oak trees behind the barn and the maples along the river. If you fell you' d be swept down the river, down the waterfall over the cliff and into the St. Lawrence, her mother said. She was always sure the belugas would meet her there, and bear her up and away to the Saguenay.

She was down. She rubbed her burning hands and picked out the flakes of rust printed in her stomach. She brushed offher jeans, jammed her wet feet into her boots and set off down to the square. There wasn 't a soul on their street, but her cousin Tom 's bicycle, she noticed, usually locked to a chainlink fence around a vacant lot, had been trashed, and there were broken beer bottles lying beside il. She threw a thought towards how he would get to school tOlTIOrrOW - certainly his 14

mother, her aunt Carmen, wouldn 't help, she ~ d be stoned as usual, but perhaps his sister Beatrice would take him. She reeled the thought in again. Why should she care about everyone else's children aIl the time? But if she didn 't hold them all together, the whole lot would be shipped offto the city s child protection agency.

She ran up the grassy ramparts, stabbing at the grass with her hands for balance, and walked north along the tops of the city walls. Down below on one side

Billy Carol was loading the last of the calèche horses into the horseboxes to take back down to the stables on Saint-Vallier. He must be dying to get to the pub: it was a cold night. On the other side, the parliament buildings were lit up like a casino, and in the light snow the gloolny statues of the Famous People were starting to look chilly in their jackets or waistcoats and ties.

She slid down the hill to the road. Cauchon the pomographer had closed up his restaurant, probably off somewhere making snuff movies, and the old National

School next door seelned to have fallen a little further down: a green window-frame hung at a new angle.

As Violet approached Carré d'Youville she could hear the rumbling roar, then the silence of the jump, and then the SCRAC! as the wheels landed and the roar took up again . Faut lander sur les balts sinon tu vas l'sauter, she' d heard him explain to novices. Tonight there were about a dozen guys in their tuques; they'd set up sorne traffic cones stolen fron1 a sidewalk fancification project worksite up the street. They jUlnped off the bandstand on one side of the square, shot across the skating rink and jumped the flourescent cones in the lniddle. SOlnetimes he taught the younger ones who arrived. fresh from a day at school. She mimicked his speech under her breath as she watched. Tufais un 3-6 kickjlip revert .. . For sorne reason 15

she found his mixing of French and English erotic. Il fait un nollie pis un 'ardjlip et

un nose-manuel, pis un pop-shove pour board-slider un set de dix marches. It

sounded strangely intimate, perhaps because it was the way she and her cousins

talked amongst themselves.

But the boarders weren 't talking tonight. They were all listening to Iron

Maiden or sOll1ething on their ipods that would pump them up enough to go down

the rails. She could hear the pounding even from where she sat as they rolled past.

Every now and then someone fell down. Their knees were always bloody; there was

never even time for scabs before the next fall. Except for him: he was too good. The

other one, the one who always watched him nearly as closely as Violet did, but

more obviously, was sticking to him and seemed to be afraid of the rest. Ifhe made

a bad landing he' d sit on the bandstand steps and examine the wheels and chassis

very close]y, as ifthat were his problem.

Violet sat down on the steps leading down from the old vaudeville theatre, the

Palais Montcahll, and watched. The snow was dancing around her chal11pion in

teasing httle tornados. Another group of girls was watching hinl too.l'Il get him first, she thought. Ifl 'm not too fat. If my bum looks okay. When they stopped, he

came straight over to her and popped out an earphone. Her heart junlped like an eager dog.

"Hi! l'm Yannick and me and David here we're going up to the National

School for a bat. Wanna come?"

She looked up hungrily into his wide generous face. At last she could look in his eyes, wanll and swalllp-green. She stood up slowly, smiling, pushing her hair off 16

her face. They walked around the corner and prepared to scale the chainlink fence that was a defence precisely against them.

"Here, 1' 11 help you," said Yannick, holding out hands clasped together for her to step into.

"No," she said, "1 can do it. l've already escaped from one prison tonight. l got down the drainpipe of my house. l just have to get my boots off. "

"Don 't believe in doors?"

''l've been grounded for a week," she said, tugging at her boots.

"Grounded? l didn 't know they did that any more." He watched in amazement as she flung her boots over the fence and then clÏ1nbed it with ease, sticking her toes through the wire links.

"1 saw you and your kid brother before," said Yannick as they dropped down on the other side. Violet blushed as she put her boots on again. She didn 't even know he'd noticed her and Tom watching in the square. "So what badass thing did you do?"

"Nothing," she said. "It's never anything."

David had foIlowed them at a suIlen distance. He had a round shiny head and a leathery mouth that hung open. He took a crowbar out from an obscure siot under the building and pried a piece ofbattered plywood off one of the back windows.

Yannick took nails out ofhis pocket to show Violet.

"That's for putting it back later." He laughed and she laughed too, nervously.

This was what the bad kids did. She wondered what other bad things she would do in his company. 17

She followed thern into the building. It smelled of smoke and mould. Their boots echoed as they walked up a wide wooden staircase. She stroked the smooth curving bannister in admiration. Two of the stairs were broken and they had to jump over them. Violet could see through into the lower floor: yellow mushrooms were growing through thefloorboards. Upstairs, broken beer bottles had been kicked into the corners of the room. There were a few old desks and a blackboard across a whole wall. Elaborate mouldings on the ceiling had been used for target practice, and ropes of broken plaster held together with two-hundred-year-old horsehair hung in festoons. Sorne filthy cushions, which perhaps had once been green, were placed around a black patch in the Iniddle of the floor. People had been making bonfires on the old hardwood floors. The boys pulled plastic bags out of their pockets, rolling papers and Inatches. Phew, thought Violet. 1t's just marie-jeanne.

"It's freezing" she said. "Can 't we turn on sorne heat?"

"In just one Inoment, madalne," said Yannick, smiling'radiantly at her.

David roJ1ed the joints with a cheap li,ttle cigarette machine, popping them out expertly into his hand while Yannick made a fire on a piece of ru stY sheet iron and a panel of asbestos insulation. He pulled bits of painted wainscotting from the walls for kindling and pried up sorne planks from the floor for firewood. She watched his broad, serious face, pitted with old acne scars, as he bent to the task, his dark curly hair sticking to his forehead. His actions were hard and rough and sure, as if aIl his life he'd been heaving heavy objects about with resentful precision. Hay baIes, she suddenly rea}jzed. He's a runaway farrn boy. She watched and waited, feeling useless, but offering to help would be even 11lore foolish. 18

Soon their taciturn activity lightened up under the influence of the drug and the heat.

"1 never saw a girl hurl boots that like before," said Yannick as they stretched their wet feet towards the fire.

"l'm an old hand at hurling," she said. "1 was raised hurling hay baIes." She looked at him covertly. "After wet haybales, boots are a piece of cake."

"Heya David, another farmer," said Yannick. David raised his head to look at her for the first tinle.

"Yeah," he said. "You can sure throw boots good."

"Nearly killed the cat throwing my boots tonight. One tÎJne 1 thr"ew them, 1 hit the neighbour out for a quiet piss in the dark. He gave a yell and the piss went a11 over the kitchen window."

They started laughing and laughing, replaying Violet throwing her boots over the fence and other boot-throwing incidents. She kept them going, telling them stories of a11 the droll ways she' d outwitted her mother. She gauged their reactions in the glimmer of the dingy firelight as smoke drifted out of the broken window panes, honing her stories to ratchet up their laughter to a shrill pitch.

David was hooting and braying now, his loose l110uth hanging wide open and sucking in air noisily. The nlore ridiculous their noises became, the better Violet liked it. Yannick was now laughing at David, too.

"Hey, watch out Davey boy" he said, "they'll think one of the calêche horses has broken loose." Sure enough, just then they heard a horse whinny frol11 up the road where they were tethered, and Violet gasped and burst out laughing. But. now

David tried to stop laughing and a pained expression came into his eyes. In his 19

effort to stop, his shiny face twisted painfully and looked as if he were about to cry.

Violet's pleasure in her narrative power tumed into stony panic. Now they were

laughing at him, he was getting angry.

"C 'est pas drôle de toute façon, hein?" he said to Yannick. "Girls and their

stupid fucking parent problems. We're past that, anyway." He looked at her

savagely. "Just get out, is aIl."

"Hey, it's okay, pal, relax," said Yannick.

Perhaps David was angry because she was a girl and as the boys in school had

taught her, girls weren't supposed to be funny. He gave a short laugh, not the least

bit horselike now, and looked back at Yannick, trying to draw him into shared

contelnp1. Yannick was ignoring him.

"He just got a sudden bad head rush, it's this crap canna," he said. "They put

windex in i1. " He was rolling another joint, stilllaughing gently to hÏJnself and

shaking his head as he delicately spread the dry dusty weed along the rolling paper

with blunt blocky thumbs that Violet eyed with desire. She wanted those thumbs, on

her, in her.

David got up heavily and wandered offto the corner of the rOOln where the

desks were. He pu11ed out a couple of drawers and slnashed theln with the crowbar.

Then he sat down and began picking at the splinters and ordering theJn into sma11 piles according to size and colour. He becalne 1nore and more absorbed in this, leaving Yannick and Violet to themselves.

But now she was shy .. Outside the arched windows the snow was whirling in thick clouds in the sulphurous yellow lampligh1. Yannick sat by the fire cross- 20

legged, laughing and shaking his head, smiling, and finally looking up at her. He

patted his lap and jerked his head.

"Colne over here."

She'd hardly got his fly open when David was looming over them with the

crowbar.

"Get offhim, get back you bitch!" he shouted, brandishing the bar in her face.

"Oh-oh, no you don 't," said Yannick, getting up stiffly and then lunging

sudden1y at David's wrist and twisting his ann behind his back so he dropped the

crowbar. David tried punching Yannick with his other fist but Yannick dodged,

causing David to faU to the floor. Violet saw his fat belly and hips burst out over the

waist ofhis jeans as he landed and roUed, and she started backing away towards the

door. He was shouting, cursing obscenely, and then fell silent, thun1ping the

tloorboards rhythlnically with his feet.

"Yannick!" he whimpered. "Don 't!"

"Shut up!" hissed Yannick. "Get out of here! Just leave Ine alone for once!

Can 't you control yourself?" David stood up, and his narrow black eyes glittered menacingly from qeep in his fleshy face as he glared at Yannick. He stood with his legs apart, panting and tren1bling.

"Y ou don 't know what she is!"

"What the hel] do you know?" said Violet aggressively.

"She's a whore and she's probably got the clap," said David. Then he tumed his round head to look at her. "And you, you leave hin1 alone."

* * * 21

Huddled figures Inoved carefully about the square. Old people dressed in

sensible waterproof winter boots and bedraggled fur hats were getting on and off the

moming buses. Yannick's hoodie drooped soggily over his face, his bare red hands

hung by his sides. His jeans were streaked with rain and his boots squelched as he

walked. It was raining and the snow on the ground was sodden.

"1 gotta go to work," she said.

"Can l see you on the weekend?"

"Maybe Saturday night. But David, will he be there?"

"Don't worry about David. He's okay, he's just a bit simple."

"Simple maybe but he' d like to kill me."

"Or me. But he won 't, it's a11 ' bluff. He's watched too mu ch wrestling on TV,

that's aIl. He thinks he's the British Bulldog."

They were silent until they reached the intersection where they were to part.

To cross the road she had to wade out into a vast puddle of salty slushy water, how

deep she couldn 't tell. She glanced at hün but he was already looking past her down

Saint Jean Street, toward what other rendezvous? she wondered, but didn't dare ask.

He hesitated, water trickling offhis hair and dripping off the end ofhis nose. A taxi

drove by and a grey arc ofwater cascaded over theln both. They staggered

backwards, laughing and cursing, shaken back together out oftheir separate private

awkwardnesses.

"T'es-tu carree?" He touched her shoulder with a raw hand. She nodded, and taking a deep breath with her last shred of dignity, waded out into the slush-puddle on her new platfonns, her ragged jean-cuffs drinking up the water and her feet 22

turning icy wet yet again. As she climbed d'Auteuil hill the cold rain dripped

through her jacket and ran down her shoulders on to her breasts. She caught her

breath, sobbing, and felt warm water mixing in with the cold on her face.

When she reached her street, Violet felt a11 the dreads and responsibilities

crowding back into her head like animaIs around a feeding trough. Her mother's

worry this morning to find her gone, her father's fury. School, Carmen, Tom.

A gigantic snowplough came swinging around the corner, ye110w lights

flashing, and took off down the hill. The ploughs would be working aIl day, pushing

the wet snow up and down the streets and heaping it up along the sides, narrowly

missing the corners of buildings as the plough jockeys felt their first thri1ls of the

season. Tonight they'd be kept awake by the snowblowers, their power-take-offs

screaming and shaking the old houses to their foundations as they slowly sucked up

the snow and blew it into the waiting trucks which carted it away to Duberger and

dumped it on what used to be Aunt Edna's fafIn. Her lTIother still ca11ed it Little

River, to Violet's annoyance.

"Mum! No-one cal1s it that anymore. No-one knows what the he1l you're

talking about."

"1 know," her mother would say, "] forget the new names."

Violet pushed her hands awkwardly into the cramped coslnetic pockets of

her black jacket as she trudged over a ridge of sodden snow left by the plough. The

snow gave way under her weight and she sank up to her knees. She gasped with

cold.

After pulling herself out of the morass offreezing slush again, she looked up just in time to see a clump of snow and ice the size of an armchair slide off the 23

Gravels' roof and l~nd with a THWUNK on the sidewalk, only inches from her

Aunt Carmen. Carmen was standing talking to her neighbour Madame GraveI, both

Ieaning on plastic snow shovels. The clump sprayed their ankles with slush as it landed. Cannen barely paused for breath. She simply stepped to one side, that ridiculous ragged blonde ponytail bobbing on top ofher head, and carried right on talking as ifbeing killed by falling ice was just as good as any other way, as if after aIl when your time is up, it' s up.

Violet stifled a cry of anger. Here ~ s Carmen home from the hospital for a change, and she gets kil1ed by falling ice! Who'd look after Tom if Cannen was gone? .

Madalne Gravel, her old green raincoat tied primly at the waist, tried to break off the conversation a~d move out of danger, glancing up at the roof repeatedly, tom between terror of death by fal1ing ice and her alrnost equal terror of interrupting Carmen.

"Colne on, Cannen," said Violet, just to wipe the panic offMrne Gravel 's face. "Let's go and have sorne hot chocolate at your place." 24

Chapter 3

Bones

When Maude àrrived home there was a white unmarked truck at the door. It had just

delivered an enormous pine crate, and as Tom had said, it was big enough to hold a

fullsize labrador. Violet was standing in the sn1al1 front room and contemplated the

crate glumly from behind her limp curtain of black hair. She waited for her 1110ther' s

lecture, her sorrow, her flailing around to try and find the next appropriate

punishment.

Rer mother was so excited about seeing the pine crate that she barely looked

at Violet. Maude pried open the crate with a screwdriver and was now panting and

clutching her chest as she plucked ineffectively at the inner package, \vhich was

wrapped in what looked like ancient watenl1arked manuscripts tied with thin red

ribbons. Violet watched the scene with growing impatience. Finally she took a flick-

knife from sOll1ewhere amongst the several layers covering her chest and began

hacking at the ribbons. Maude watched her with terrified adll1iration.

"What do you carry that around for?" she asked.

"Just in case something needs opening," said Violet. "Or someone."

"Oh darling, don 't say things like that. Anyway what have you been ... "

Violet looked at her 1110ther curiously. The words trailed out ofMaude's 1110uth like a habit, her emotions were elsewhere.

"1 got stuck at a friend 's and the 1ast bus had 1eft ... " but Violet's voice, too, trailed off as she saw her mother wasn 't listening to a word. 25

Inside the first Iayers of manuscripts were hundreds oftiny packages, a11 wrapped with almost nautical precision in oilstained cotton. A strange smell carne off thern, of meat that has sat in the sun aIl day in the butcher' s window.

"What on earth are they?" said Violet, taking a step back.

"l'm not sure, but they're from Father Hormidas," said Maude. She unwrapped one of the tiny packages carefully and turned her back on Violet. Violet craned her neck but couldn 't see anything except what looked like sorne broken china. "Oh Lord," said her mother, "they must be the relics from Precious Blood."

"Whatfrom what?" said Violet, wrinkling up her nose as ifher mother had just offered her a handful of dog turds.

The days when her mother had taught her catechism, pu]] ing holy cards and plastic rosaries out of her apron pockets, making her memorize prayers, were long over. Violet had liked it at the time, begging Maude to tell her over and over and again how the Iroquois had eaten up Brébeufs heart. Then Violet would go off and tell it a11 to her cousins Beatrice and Tom, because their own nl0ther never told them any of that stuff. But when her friends began to laugh at her about it, Violet said she wasn't going to ehurch any more. For a couple more years Maude only gave her poeket money if she went, but when she was fourteen Violet said she didn't care, she'd leave sehool and get ajob, so Maude laid off. Now Violet found her l11other' s prayer groups and relies and insistenee on going off to Mass every day a welcome distraction from keeping tabs on her own eomings and goings. But her l11other's exeitel11ent over this was disturbing. lt was ahllost indecent.

"You don't want to be around for this," said Maude, still short ofbreath.

Her tone was one that Violet reeognized. It was the same one her aunt used on the 26

children when she had just opened the door to a dealer. A kind ofbreathless intimacy, one that excluded everything and everyone else. Violet felt something sure and steady had been taken away from her, and that now she was really on her own. It wasn't funny any more.

Maude suddenly came to herself and turned to face Violet, her soft jowls trembling, and swiped angrily at the stray wisps of hair in her face. She narrowed her little eyes and pursed her lumpy blue lips, ready for an assault.

"Don 't think 1 won 't be talking to you later, nly girl," she said. "1' ve been up aIl night worrying. Go upstairs right now."

But Violet didn 't want to be sent away. "1 was with Beatrice ... " she began, her eyes filling with tears, tears that she suddenly found were real in spite of the lies she was about to tell.

* * *

Maude finally finished wrapping up "her friends" again and packing them back into their crate. The effort and excitement of it a11 had distracted her for a good hour from Violet's night out. Last time she had been halftempted to believe Violet's feeble-story about looking after the condonls for a friend. She' d thought perhaps the grounding had given Violet a chance to think about it aIl. Now the gravity of the situation hit Maude like a tomahawk through the cranium. The child was obviously in trouble, but couldn 't COlne out with anything but lies. What was Maude going to say? What could she do? She couldn 't possibly share her fears with her husband

Reggie: he already thought the very worst. She fel1 into her wing chair in 27

exhaustion, feeling for her cigarettes. She leapt right out again, having landed on

something hard.

It was a little reliquary, a tiny hinged box made of nl0ther-of-pearl with a

glass front and red velvet inside. Set in the velvet, and surrounded by tiny scrolls of

paper in delicate paisley swirls, was a piece of discoloured bone, pinned to the

velvet like a butterfly specimen. Undemeath it was written, "Sancta Marta." Martha,

as in Martha and Mary! Perhaps a bone from her knuckle that had always been

inches deep in dishwater, scrubbing away at the terracotta plates while that lazy

Mary sat around on her big ass listening to wise words from the mouth of the Lord.

And here was one of her fingers, literal1y worn to the bone.

How did Hormidas manage to get hold of aIl this, she wondered yet again,

and what did he think he was doing, leaving it a11 to her in his will? l'he Sacred

Heart Sisters of the Precious Blood, a religious order that he had started in his parish

just so he could get his relic collection catalogued, displayed and preserved for

posterity, plus a bit ofhousekeeping, were still around, after aIl. A handful of old

WOl11en living in a draughty box of a house in Joliette, sti11 rustling about in that

outrageous costul11e he designed for them: a gigantic red heart on a white

background, with a stripe ofblood sluicing diagonally down the robe to the hem. It

was these WOl11en who had slaved away their years l11aking reliquaries, repairing

them, labelling them, washing the relics and sometimes, ifthey were worried about

sOI11ething, or ill, dropping thel11 secretly into their tea. And now, twenty years after

Hormidas had died, they were obliged by his will to send them to Maude, that

WOl11an who, over a period of four years aIl that time ago, had stayed too often and too long in the presbytery, supposedly translating Abbé Hormidas's writings. 28

When he died, they thought, at least they'd still have the relics to look after.

But he had swept that last raison d'être away, leaving them to her. A lay woman, a young unmarried woman (she was only eighteen), a woman who they'd barely known, except as she slipped through their clutches into hi s office, and th en out again, hurrying into the night with her flushed cheeks and her red hair.

What on earth was she going to tell Reggie? It was an old question, a question she hadn 't had to ask in aIl the years since Honnidas had died, and now she felt a surge of anger at Honnidas for making her ask it again. Reggie, who had a cynical and clinical view of the affairs of the church, would think Hormidas's relic collection had been just a big financial scam to get more money into the parish using the beJiefs of the people Hormidas held to be gullible and puerile. He wouldn 't be the only one who thought that way.

Everyone in Europe was flogging their relies in Hormidas' time, as the rUl110Ur was that the Pope was about to ban their sale. The fashion for relies in

Europe had died out, but not yet in Quebec. Abbé Honl1idas bought up hundreds of relies for a song and shipped them home to Preeious Blood. He built a round stone tower, Iike a windll1ill, in whieh to display them. It was called the Tour des Martyrs, and it was going to attract pilgrims from all over Canada: it would be another Ste-

Anne-de-Beaupré. With great flourish he gave other relies to the Grand Séminaire at

Quebec, whose superior received thell1 with nlisgiving. He had a distaste for the devotions' of the poor and wondered if it was not hUll1iIiating to be receiving

Europe' s castoffs.

The Tour des Martyrs hadn 't worked. The pilgriIl1ages 111ade to the village were few and far between, the meals eaten, the ouvenirs bought, the "inns" they 29

stayed in - it didn 't amount to much cash for the poor farmers around there, who

disappeared off to the woods every winter for sorne cash as bûcherons and lost

every grain of virtue so painstakingly cultivated over the summer. In the end, to his

rage, it was the maudits protestants who gave the farmers their first taste of cash

when they came in with their loud voices and fine horses and built a dam, flooded

the village of Saint-Fulgence - "only ] 50 âmes" they said - and used the power

to build a pulpmill. The salaries were bigger than anyone had ever dreamed of, and

a pat on the back from the foreman once every ten years seemed to mean more to

the men than the weekly blessings from their faithful servant the parish priest, with

relics or without. It was a bitter harvest, in the end.

In the meantÏ1l1e, though, Abbé H0f111idas loved the cloak and dagger trips to

Italy, frenetically buying up the relics from impoverished Italian aristocrats. He

wrote long impassioned letters to Maude, peppered with extraordinarily erotic

messages in Latin (as if anyone else would struggle through his appalling

handwriting), but mostly name-dropping. He listed the Venetian counts and Roman

dukes with whom he was hobnobbing, named the wines they had consumed

together, described their palazzos in concupiscent detail. He told stories about trips

with the Canadian Jesuits, mostly French, to co]ourful and cunning antique dealers

from whom they had bought everything fronl scientific instruments to l11ummies

pilfered frol11 the Egyptian tombs. He bought a few hiIllself, figuring he would sel1

them to the Petit Séminaire and make a bit on the sideif his relic plan didn 't pan

out.

His parishioners in Precious Blood wou]d have preferred hÏJl1 to stay at

home and do what priests were needed for: baptising them, marrying them, and

------30

most of aIl, burying them. Every time someone was at death's door, and Hormidas

was off on one his relic jaunts, the old women of the Confrèrie du Bon Trépas de

Saint-Joseph had to pay for a boat to cross the river and beg the priest from

Contrecoeur to come to hear the poor soul 's confession and administer the last rites.

Father Elzéar Mazout, with whom Maude had crossed the river severa] times on her

visits to Precious Blood, would sit there bal~fully in the back of the boat, clutching

the Blessed Sacrament on his soutaned knees, giving little squeals of distress

whenever they got splashed by the waves, while the Pouliot boys rowed them

across. By the time they' d crossed the river four times there and back, those boys

practically needed the last rites themselves. As often as not it was win ter and the

river was half frozen, so they were half in the water and half out, one foot in the

boat and one foot out on the ice, straddling the gunwhales with their genitals in

rnortal peril, or hauling the boat over a Jllountain of ice massed up into jagged peaks

by the changing tides so that the bow pointed ahllost straight up in the air. Other

times they were simply carried off upstream on a rising 22-foot flood tide.

The parish eventually begged the Bishop to remove Abbé Hormidas, and

many a night Maude had accoJllpanied him through that period, as he railed and

tlailed against his ungrateful flock. And nowadays nobody had ever heard of the

Tour des Martyrs, except a few people in Precious Blood and Joliette, and they

mostly just frowned or burst into maniacal Iaughter. H0f111idas had been sent to the

missions, Maude was told, and she had never seen or heard from him again. She had

pictured him in China, wading through flooded rice paddies in his soutane and a

wide-brimmed conical hat, holding his travelling mass-kit over his head.

~------31

Perhaps Violet would get sorne disease. Maude suspected it was her fault.

Children know in their bodies the things their parents don 't tell them, even if they

don 't know in their minds. Then they are doomed to somehow live them out, like an

inherited disease. No wonder the poor child wandered around with condoms in her

pockets. It was called the sins of the fathers being visited on the children.

She was tainted, her family was tainted, but the saints had somehow

remained untainted through it aIl. They had stayed her friends. And even Hormidas,

for aIl his flalTIboyant fraudulence, had become fond of them. When the Tour des

Martyrs had failed, he did not hold it against them. He felt he was their protector,

their Michael the Archangel.

"Without me," he declared, "they' d have been thrown out. They would have

been eaten by dogs in the streets of Rome."

What was it going to mean to have their bones in her house? Why had

Hormidas wanted her to have them? And why now, twenty years after he was dead?

Perhaps they were meant to help her deal with Violet. Who was the right saint for

all this anyway? Sainte-Ursule and her thousands ofvirgins? Surely it was far too

late for her to help. But then perhaps Sainte-Ursule could help restore Violet's hymen even now, the way Mary's was supposed to have been restored after she had

Jesus.

Maude stood in the front room staring at the lanlplight falling on her bare arms with their loosening skin, remembering her younger body and thinking of

Mary. With the restoration ofher hymen did her nipples also return to their pre- suckling size, did her stonlach lose its pizza-dough looseness and retum to its slim elastic pre-children selftoo? Those old nlen should have minded their own business 32

about women's bodies, she thought, pulling her cardigan tightly around her

shoulders and folding her arms. Who decided her hymen was unbroken? She could

imagine the Church Fathers in their purple hats discussing Mary' s hymen around a

polished board-room table in the Hymen Chamber of the Vatican, the Pope sitting

on a big golden chair making a circle with his fingers and elucidating his theory in a

sonorous voice which echoed up into the vaulted ceiling among the gargoyles,

hanging there open-mouthed, forgotten monsters Iurking aImost too high to see,

laughing themselves sick. Of course the gargoyles were right. Virginity had nothing

to do with hymens. One could surely be a born-again virgin.

But what about AIDS, aIl those nasty diseases you could catch? St. Roch,

the patron saint of epidelllics? Yes, yeso He was the one. She would go down there

right now, tb the massive church plonk in the Illiddle of the poorest part oftown.

Maude believed herself a woman of action. If prayer didn 't involve touching

sOIllething real, or son1eone, or putting her feet on the ground one in front of the

other, it was no concern of hers, it was j ust a string of disappointing words and

boring sermons.

But first she had to decide where to hide the crate. Reggie was exercising at

the gYlll , and when he caIlle hOllle she didn 't want hÎlll tripping over a crate of

bones. He wouIdn 't deal well with that. He' d shout a bit, and then when she wasn 't 1

around, take the whole thing to the dUlllp. But the crate was huge. She' d need help

to get it into the boxrooI11, the only place he left alone, on the third floor across froI11

Violet's rOOlll. But it would never fit through the hatch. She'd have to break it up

into sIlla]]er quantities first. No, she decided, she'd have to leave it here. She pushed it into a corner of the room by the standing lamp, draped a folded lace tablecloth 33

over it to make it look as though it was meant to be there, grabbed a vase of

Everlasting from the kitchen window and stuck it on top, and told the cat not to sharpen her claws on it. She wrapped Martha back up and put her in her pocket along with the bus tickets.

* * *

lt was only a twenty-minute walk to St. Roch, past Parliament Hill with its Elysian pretentions right down into the heart of the Lower Town sIums. Maude walked in a beeline across the Parliament lawn and across St. Augustin Street, DOW called Rue des ParlelTIentaires. The street names were changing from names of her friends the saints, like St. Augus6ne and St. Cyril, to those of politicians or political ideologies.

You didn 't know who there was to talk to anylTIOre as you went along. She crossed

Parc de la Francophonie and Rue de l'Amérique française and scuffled crossly through heaps of shivering tulip tree Ieaves dried to a crisp yellow.

The bitter wind on Boulevard René Lévesque nearly took her breath away.

St. Cyrille used to be its name, but he no longer hovered over the neighbourhood.

Now it was René Levesque with his baggy red eyes, affectionately dropping cigarette ash on his civil servants. The new elms they' d planted in spring were not going to make it through the winter, that was clear. City workers had wrapped them up in hessian to protect them from the col d, and tied rope around their waists. AlI wrapped, they looked a bit like Reggie, she thought, lumpy top and bOttOlTI, and slightly bowed over at the top.

Maude remernbered when the old ones had been cut down. In fact the whole neighbourhood had been cut down; they pulled down every last house to build this 34

big wide road, and aIl these tall cement hotels and govemment buildings with prison-like slits for windows. Now the wind whistled down here with venomous abandon. Her mother's friend Mrs Meehan in her cold water flat, when they knocked her building down had had to move to Saint Sauveur, far from her church on McMahon Street. Her sons couldn 't skate to church any more down the frozen streets, and her husband's'bar, with its sawdust floor and Friday night fights, had to move out to Ste-Foy.

Those branches considered ll1ature enough to be left unwrapped were bending stiffly in the cold wind. Maude stood at the foot of an adolescent elm waiting for the bus. She stared up into the air looking at something stuck in a branch near the top. lt looked like an angel, no, it was a whole line of angels sitting along a branch, eating ice-crea111s. It must be having Martha in my pocket that does it, thought Maude. She strained her eyes and could make out the feathers oftheir wings ruffling in the wind. One ofthem was playing a golden trumpet. It was another ofthose things she was going to have to keep to herself. ln the old days people saw angels a11 the time, but they appeared much less now, or perhaps they just sat on the higher branches.

ln the bus people were wrapped too, and quiet, staring disconsolately out the windows. AlI the young people wore ipods, even the couple with bristly red hair like a pair of Rhode Island hens, who were holding hands and sometimes kissing, but not speaking. The music must be more interesting than what either ofthem had to say, or thought they had to say, or thought they would hear the other say. The young 111an beside Maude was carrying a skateboard on his knees. Its sharp edges kept poking into her si de, and she moved Martha to the other pocket. "Relie crushed ------1

35

by skateboard in bus" appeared on her running list of inner newspaper headlines. It

started to snow.

The bus hurtled down Côte d'Abraham and Jeff Million, the host of the

radio station that the bus driver was listening to, was starting a rant against a

politician who wanted to shut his radio station down because he'd said that all

Africans were cannibals. Radio Million had become a religion in itself: people had

begun attributing miracles to him. One man said he had lost 80 pounds thanks to

Jeff. But when she was riding her bike in the summer it was often the cars wearing

his radio-station sticker that nearly knocked her down or ran her off the road.

To get to the church Maude had to walk into the longest mall in North

America. It was created by sÏlnply putting a roof over an entire street. She pushed

open the doors and was practically knocked over by the hot wind coming through a

floor grill in the entranceway. It was a busy morning, but there weren't lnany

shoppers in sight. Teenaged girls hung around near the phone booths, slnoking and

switching their babies fronl hip to hip, and people in wheelchairs sat in circles near

the benches, which were draped with old men and fat women carrying lumpy nylon

bags. The man with the bright red dreadlocks was doing a kind of half-skip through

the mail with his head in the air, talking animatedly to someone whom Maude

couldn 't see. They were aIl out of the cold, but were too poor to buy anything. The

only stores that weren 't boarded up were the dépanneurs, Dollarama and

Moneylnart, \vhich did a brisk business at least once a month in welfare cheques.

The thought of Carmen flicked briefly through Maude's mind, but since she

always assumed Carmen's addiction was her own, Maude's fault, like Violet's

delinquence, it was much easier not to think about her. But they lived on the same

------~ 36

street, which made forgetting difficult. She told herself it was temporary, this crack thing. But now Carmen's husband had given up and gone back to Baie Comeau, her niece Beatrice was a stonyfaced manipulative teenager, and her nephew Tom was a malnourished neglected child. Surely what Carmen herself said was true: she'd get over it soon enough. Maude just had to trust. When Carmen was in good shape their whole street felt different to Maude. Her family felt complete, her past made sense, she laughed. When Carmen wasn't, Maude blocked her ears, and her eyes, and her mind as she walked past Cannen's house, and waited for Carmen to come back from wherever she went. Maude was lonely at those times.

W orkmen were starting to take the roof of the malI down. Funny, thought

Maude, it SeelTIS only yesterday they were building it. Each generation so eagerly tears down what the previous one has built, and btiilds what will be equal1y eagerly tom down by its children. And where would these young people go in the winter, with their babies, and these old people, when the roofwas gone? She opened the door that went directly from the dingy malI into a vast, cavemous church. She dipped her hand into a stone waterbasin shaped like a shell and crossed herself before hurrying down the aisle. Above one of the many side-altars a large flap of dusty pink ceiling was hanging off like a piece of skin. The regulars were there: the man with a cancerous grapefruit-sized nose that hung down below his chin, the woman with her dog inits pale blue terrytowel outfit, the ancient twin sisters on their knees saying their rosaries together who Iooked up at Maude as she passed.

Their eyes were like four squeezed lelTIOns. "Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death," they said cheerily, smiling and waving to her in perfect unison.

------37

She sat down right under Saint Roch. He stood there on a piIlar, lifting up

his skirt dolefully to reveal a suppurating wound. His dog was looking up at the

wound, rather hungrily it seemed, but it already had something in its mouth, a loaf.

Maude felt in her pocket and her fingers closed around Martha's knuckle. She used

to talk to the relics in the Tour des Martyrs and Hormidas used to laugh at her. Now

he' d organized it so he' d be laughing at her for etemity.

"What do you think ofthat?" she asked Martha, jerking her head towards

Saint Roch.

"Unhygie.nic," Martha replied immediately, "and why is he wearing a skirt?"

"That was the fashion in the olden days," said Maude.

"Yes but the dog and the bread? What a waste!" said Martha. "It could have

been used to feed the poor! Not that they de serve it either. Those kids in the maIl, 1

don 't know, they're a disgrace. Generation after generation of layabouts. It gets in

the genes."

"No, you don 't understand," said Maude. "That dog saved his life. He had

the plague-"

"Ugh!" said Martha.

"-and they chased him out oftown, so he went and hid in the woods, and

that dog caIne and brought hiIn food every day until he was okay again. It was a

miracle. A dog and a bit ofbread. At least he· had somewhere to hi de, a hunter's

cabin. These kids will have nowhere to go when they tear down the malI."

"It's remarkable, how you, a person who's never died, can still tell me things

1 don 't know," said Martha, her effort at generosity tinged with sarcaSIn in spite of 38

herself. "Anyway, what are we doing down here? We could have gone to the

Basilique and talked to Our Lady. Saint Roch is a total nobody."

"It's Violet. She's bound to catch sorne vile disease from those boys. What

are we going to do, Roch?"

"Chase her out of the house," said Martha, "and see if a dog COlnes and

looks after her." Maude ignored her, but ren1embering the dog in the hairdressers,

wondering if it had in fact come for Violet. "Serves her r1ght," went on Martha, "she

should have taken precautions."

"She does take precautions. That's how l know what she's up to. l just hope

she bought sorne more." Maude fished out the box that she'd confiscated and pulled

out a couple of condoms. She fingered the tiny rubber rings curiously and then

stretched one or two of them out until an artifical throat-clearing made her turn to

see the three ]elllon-eyed WOlnen staring, pale with shock. She shoved them

hurriedly back in her pocket.

"Blow a few up, why don 't you," cackled Martha. "and bounce theln down

the aisle."

"You have changed! " said Maude sharply. "1 thought you were nicer than

that in the Bible. Are you sure you did enough time in purgatory?" .

"They didn 't know the details, in the Bible," said Martha sullenly. "They never wrote down what it was like to live with Lazarus after he' d been raised from the dead. Insufferable, and he slnelt bad into the bargain. Goody Two-Shoes Mary was nothing compared to the refonned Lazarus."

"You 're just trying to distract Ine from Saint Roch. He hasn 't said a word yet. " 39

"It's Mary Mother of, that you'll be wanting," said Martha firmly. "The

girl 's probably getting herselfknocked up at this very moment and she's going to

feed you sorne cock and bull story about a pigeon being responsible. Mary'll set you

right on that."

Maude didn 't laugh. Martha shut up and sat silent in her little cotton

wrapping, and there was a stirring in the murky hollows of the church with its dusky

tleshcoloured walls as a young woman approached the microphone and began to

lead the assembly in saying the rosary. First there was the echoing crash ofwooden

kneelers hitting the mosaic fioor and then the rattle of beads against the backs of

pews, and at the first drone of the singsong responses Maude thought perhaps it was

Mary she did want, after aIl.

" ... Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death," she

n1umbled.

She saw Mary sitting on the edge ofher bed, a rickety camp bed in a dark

bare rOOI11, mopping her brow at the hour of her death. Where would that be? In

what hou se, what country? Would Reggie be there too? What about Violet? And wouldn 't that crappy little bed collapse under all that weight? "No but God, really," she added, "you 've got to help Ille with that daughter of mine." 40

Chapter 4

Ice

Violet was waiting at the ferry terminal, looking out at the river through the

big blue plateglass panes. She wore giant-stitch pink fluffy mitts and clutched

tightly under her arm her new black handbag, with dangling leather thongs and

wood en beads. A cross between Goth and Métis - she knew her cousin Beatrice

would hate it. But she needed Beatrjce to hate it. It would all be easier if Beatrice

started to think of her a loser.

Beatrice came up beside her and they kissed cheeks quickly and then tumed

towards the windows.

"Wrong direction again," said Violet.

"What?" said Beatrice. "What do you mean?"

"The river's goingin the wrong direction."

Beatrice stood silently beside her looking out at the river and the great slabs

of ice careening upstreal11.

"Whatever," she said, shrugging.

They had Jess and less in com1llon. Violet used to tell Beatrice about work,

making fun of the other people and describing the disgusting food. But gradually

she had stopped, for sonle reason, she wasn 't sure why. Beatrice wasn 't laughing so llluch at the stories. She had even threatened to leave school, and Violet felt if she made her job seem too attractive she'd be the one to blame if Beatrice dropped out at sixteen.

"How's your Mum doing, now she's out?" asked Violet. 41

"Quiet. She's only back for the weekend, going back to hospital next

week."

"When she coming out?"

"Dunno."

"Who'll Tom stay with?"

"Your mum. Or Ille. Or our dad."

Beatrice's voice was hard when she talked about her mother's treatments.

Ber nan-ow line of a mouth wamed Violet away from pursuing that line of

conversation. Beatrice peered appraisingly into the darkened window, turning her

head slightly to try and see her profile. Anything other than surface talk made it

more difficult, she had al ways said. Even when they were very slllall. Don 't talk

about it. Let's talk about sonlething else. The only subject that they could talk about

safely was what they were looking at, at that very moment, or now, in the last few

years, boys.

Violet bit her lip, iIllagining Tom, always full of hope that this would be the

last tiIne, that his mother would be back to nonnal now for good, believing all

Carnlen told hÎ1ll. And perhaps this time it was true! But Beatrice would never

believe it.

"Your friend Yannick' s got a job at the nuthouse," Beatrice said. "1 saw

hiIll. "

"How do you know Yannick?"

"Simon knows him." Simon vv'as Beatrice's boyfriend whonl she was always ditching. 42

Violet's mother always said that Quebec may be a big city, but it's really a

village. Vou think you are moving into anonymity, compared to the country, where

everyone knows as soon as you put your nose out the back door. Then you find it's

the same in the city after aIl. Damn damn damn. Perhaps in Montreal Violet would

have sorne privacy.

"Y ou were wi th Simon?"

"He went to see my mUITI by himself, and then he told me."

So Beatrice must have been seeing Simon again. Simon adored Carmen,

possibly more than he liked Beatrice. And now Beatrice was glad to be able to tell

Violet something she didn't know about Yannick.

"He works in the clothes shop. They sell slippers and dressing gowns and

other hideous stufffor the patients. He's gorgeous. He could have got ajob

anywhere. "

Violet was annoyed.

"Did you speak to him?"

"Yeah. } told him l was your cousin."

Violet watched herself in the dark expanse of glass to make sure her face

didn't change. Perhaps she'd go see hiITI at the hospital, with the pretext ofvisiting

Carmen. She could be taking TOITI. She didn't want to talk about Yannick with

Beatrice.

"}'ve got SOITIe nl0ney," said Beatrice. "} can buy the drinks."

"Where d'you get the money?" asked Violet.

"That guy Mutingere came over to our place with sorne stufffor ITIy Mum.

She wasn 't there so ] took it to school and sold it. " 43

"Oh God Beatrice you wanna watch out. They catch you it'll be the DPl and the Centre d'Accueil." Then what will Tom do, was her thought.

"Oh don't worry. 1'11 never get caught. Simon was waiting for me outside school," she said, changing the subject. "1 told him to get lost."

"Oh really?" said Violet, feigning surprise.

"Do you think that was a mistake?" Beatrice's voice relaxed, suddenly back on fallliliar ground. The younger cousin pouring out her love problems, needing advice.

"Wel1, what do you think?"

Violet positioned herselfwearily in Hey Girl! problem page mode. The

Beatrice and Simon affair exhausted her. UnlikeBeatrice's approach to her

1110ther' s relationship with crack, she seemed to believe that each episode with

Simon was going to lead to a happy and final resolution, but after two years its interminable cycles were utterly predictable. After each new crash Beatrice need ~d cOl11forting and reassuring aIl over again, and regarded each rerun with injured surpnse.

"1 think this is really it, this time. l've had it with him, and 1 think he's had it with me for good. You should have seen hiIl1 standing there begging, aIl skinny and creepy. It was just too pathetic for words. But what about you and Yannick?"

That l110rning 1ast week in the National School, she had promised herself that this tÏ111e it was going to be different. After they had sobered up, Yannick,stil1, astonishingly, miraculously, l11ysteriously, seell1ed to like her. In spite of David, in spite of everything they'd done, he was still tender. He seemed to see sOll1ething in her that she didn 't know about, and thi s held out to her the amazing possibility that 44

one day, just one day, she might be able to be herself with hi m, given she had no

control over the whatever-it-was about her, because she didn 't.know what it was.

He' d find out soon enough, she thought, that she was basically a fake. But there was

a chance, just perhaps a tiny chance, that what he saw was actually her.

So often Violet had caught herse1f doing things just so that she could tell

Beatrice about them. Bold things, things she might not otherwise do, like giving

Yannick a blowjob on their first night. As she'd been doing it she could hear the

voice in her head describing it to Beatrice, finding the words that would make her

cousin laugh. It helped pass the time until it was over. Sometimes she indulged in a

tiny exaggeration when she told the story later, but on1y wh en it was going to be at

least twice as good as the truth, narrative1y speaking. This ca1culation was strictly

mathematical, conducted with rigorous, almost evangelical honesty. But this time

she'd decided she wasn 't going to parade her exploits with him just to make things

better with Beatrice, as if he were so much fodder she could mash up to feed to her

cousin 1ater. This time was different.

"There's nothing to tell," she said. "1 1ike him, that's aIL"

The announcement calne over the PA that the ferry was leaving. The shock of her reply was drowned in a th un der of feet pounding up the glassed-in ramp over the quay, lnuffl ed in the stealny breath of conlmuters and the slnell of diesel fumes and salt. Beatrice and Violet were swept along with the other passengers in a fuss of thick woollen coats and hurrying brief cases.

Once aboard, they leaned over the railings at the bow together as the boat ploughed a furrow through the ice on the river, its lnetal prow sl~l1nming into the slabs which cracked and rose and bounced aside or were crushed under the hull. 45

Beatrice's hair was a big puff ofred mane in the wind. Violet's blew across her face and into her mouth. They looked down at the jostling ice without speaking.

"It's freezing out here. Let's go in," said Beatrice at last.

Violet looked at her for a long tÎ1ne without saying anything, but Beatrice gazed grimly on at the cold river. They'd always stayed outside on deck, ever since they were children, whatever the weather. It had been a point ofhonour when they were both tOlnboys, both farm children with dreams of conquest.

"1 'm staying out here," said Violet quietly. Beatrice tumed and left, the door into the cabin banging shut in the wind. 46

Chapter 5

Flesh

The bar stood facing the river at the foot of a dripping black cliff. In front of it was a

large parking lot, edged by black water lapping invisibly below a dilapidated wharf.

Outside the bar someone was already lying in the snow. This was not a good sign.

What sort of place was this, where Yannick hung out? In spite of the icy feeling

between her and Beatrice, Violet felt protective towards her cousin and even a little

frightened for herself. There were no windows in the grey siding and a plywood

door had been patched with cardboard and ducktape. It looked like a place where

people got smashed and bashed up. Was she wrong -to bring Beatrice here? She

already had enough trouble on the hOlne front.

There was a bouncer standing outside the doors, a huge hulk of a man with a

bald head and a hooked nose like an eagle, a set ofkeys the size of a jailer's

dangling at his belt. He wiped his hands on his shiny blue pants and looked

aggressively down the dark street as if issuing a universal challenge. Violet realized

he had just thrown this guy out of the bar. She 100ked down at him as they

approached the door. He was moaning and rolling slowly back and forth, his face in the snow. There seelned to be no blood.

"He's just a drunk, leave hiln to cool off," said the bouncer. "He'll be al10wed

back in when he's licked Iny boots. Otherwise 1'11 toss him in the river."

Violet and Beatrice glanced at each other as they stepped tentatively past the bouncer and through the doorway. We keep going, we go in together. It was the first moment ofunderstanding since they had crossed the river in silence. They silently 47

broke their silent pact, now that there were other things to think about: corpses in

the snow, bouncers, a bar that was known for having its license lifted every few

months, and they were both underage.

They pushed open the half-doors into a fake western saloon and were met by a

wall of smoke and noise. A sepulchral bartender raised his eyebrows briefly as he

caught sight of the girls but did not interrupt the slow circular movement ofhis

dishtowel. Several men in leather jackets were perched at the bar watching a

deafening gaIne ofhockey on a large screen jammed between the whisky bottles

and the ceiling. The hockey puck sounded to Violet like gunshots and she started

nervously each time there was a sIam. The high wooden-sided booths were

crammed with custolllers, shouting to hear each other above the 10ud music and the

hockey.

"Check it out. Heavy metal in a western bar?" said Violet lightly, trying to

sound undaunted. In the corner on a sll1all dirty stage stood a girl in a short red

velvet dress with no shoulder straps. The heavy metal abruptIy ceased and she

began singing huskily into a karaoke machine, her breasts swelling dangerously

over the tight bodice.

"But th.e heavy l11etal was better than her," Violet whispered. The girl had

enough nlake-up on to disguise a corpse. Yannick and three of his friends were at

the table inlmediately adjacent, leering at the girl, who tilted and curved her body

indulgently in their direction as she sang. Yannick's glass was full and his chair was tilted back in aproprietary sort ofway. The melllories oftheir el11braces churned in

Violet's guts; she wanted to bury her head in his arms and feel his wiry black 48

sweater roughen her face. But she didn 't know if that would ever happen again. She

looked away in anguish.

The karaoke woman writhed under a pitiless strobelight, her long red nails

clicking against the metal as she stroked the microphone, and Violet admired her

round brown arms and perfectly hairless armpits. What kind of product could get an

armpit that smooth? she wondered, and immediately checked her thoughts. My mind

is running an ad for beauty products. Lotions are an escape. Yannick has already

had this chick and 1 was Just the next in line. She longed to be outside again, next to

the river carrying that sharp, cold ice up from the Saguenay.

But it was too late, the guys had seen them. Their heads with the ubiquitous

woollen tuques had aIl turned and were now pointed at them like a herd of seals

with bristly chins and big wet hungry eyes. She fol1owed Beatrice across the room

towards them. Beatrice was clearly ready to party and it seemed she had the lTIOney

to do it with style.

Violet envied her cousin. It wasn 't her freedom, which was more like neglect.

It was the unselfconscious swing ofher hips as she moved graceful1y, somehow

innocently, between the crowded tables. Had Violet herself ever made an

unselfconscious gesture in her whole life? Why did her every move have to be an

arch calcu]a60n, a design? Her terror that Yannick wou]d like Beatrice better rose up and caught her in the throat. He must like Beatrice better, any sensible person would. Violet needed a drink and she needed a cigarette, right now. She had to carry this evening off as if she knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted to be standing in the river up to her waist. 49

As they approached the table Yannick caught her eye and smiled without changing his position. The music crashed down on them and she had the feeling that they were headed for something new and dangerous. Anything lost would be irretrievable.

Yannick pulled over two extra chairs from a nearby table and put one of them between himself and David. Violet sat down, hunching her shoulders to keep from touching either of the boys. Their friends Jean-François and Tyler were entertaining the table with inlitations of their cégep teachers. She laughed with them, but she was uncomfortably aware of David' s heated beery breath beside her. Yannick treated

David' s stupid comments and braying laughter with a curious indulgence, and prevented him from drinking too much. He was still acting as his protector, for sorne reason, and Violet felt equally attracted and repelled by this quality.

Beatrice gaily bought two rounds in a row, but even so the boys soon rose to leave. Violet was relieved, but Beatrice was dismayed to find herself only half way through her second pint.

"Hey, you guys! l've lots more rounds where that one caIlle from!"

They ignored her and seemed suddenly serious and brusque. Violet thought she knew what this was about. And she knew that the romance of drugs as entertainIllent was completley lost on her cousin. Beatrice blushed and put on her coat. As soon as they were outside they took out little bags of pot frol11 their pockets and began rolling up. But they were talking about getting something better. The night was yet young.

Tyler talked to the bouncer. He shrugged and pointed to the spot in the snow where the n1a11 had been lying l11oaning. The l11al1 was gone, but there was a patch of 50

blood where he had been. They spoke sorne more and laughed and then the man

gave something to Tyler and they moved off together down the street. Violet didn 't

ask where they were going because Yannick had put his arm around her, and she

didn 't care.

The boys aIl lived together in a rooming house that was once a presbytery.

The adjacent church had been torn down and the building stood, monumental and

derelict, on a hilltop above the town of Lévis. Any day now the house would be tom

down to make way for highrise condominiums with a lTIagnificent view, north over

Quebec City, east over the Ile d'Orléans. Jean-François explained to Beatrice the

four boys had rented it on condition that they rewire and repaint it before moving in,

maintain it at their own expense, and move out as soon as the condo project was

ready to go ahead.

They walked into the cold house, their breath visible in the mouldy air. They

kept their boots on; there was newspaper on all the parquet floors. They followed a

soggy trai1 of nluddy newspapers into the kitchen. On the counter was a bong made out of a coke bottle, a blow torch, a rusty dagger, six large bottles ofbeer and a fish tank. The fish stared dismally out at them through the aIgae-smeared glass. Should one COlTIlnent on anything? wondered Violet.

"What's the blow torch for, Inaking toast?" asked Beatrice. She's so brave,

Violet thought, brave and free.

"Toasting weed," said Jean-François as he pried off a bottle cap with his plastic lighter, poured the beer into SOlne flimsyplastic party glasses, and cut a loaf ofbread into six huge chunks with the dagger. "My great grandfather's," he said, 51

brandishing the dagger. "He was a Patriote. He used it to fight the Anglos. You lot."

He laughed and Beatrice shrugged.

"Our great grandfather was a Patriote too," said Violet. "And he was an

Anglo."

"Yeah, but Irish l bet? They were okay."

"1 know," said Violet in mock earnestness. "My Dad's English, and he's a monster. They all are."

"Don't be stupid Violet," said Beatrice. "He's no worse than mine. And mine's pure laine."

"1 was joking," said Violet.

Beatrice rolled her eyes and said, "So where do we eat? l'm starving."

There was no table anywhere in sight and they took their bread and beer into the next room, which had once been a vestry. It was lined wall-to-wall with cherrywood cabinets containing shallow six-foot-wide drawers for storing vestments. These had been whitewashed over along with everything else, but Christ crucified still hung high on the wall near the ceiling, wearing a corndolly crown.

The bloody holes in his hands and feet and side were the only colour in the room.

Even his knees and the insides ofhis elbows were bruised, ripped and bleeding.

There were three brown-and-crealll sofas in the middle of the room, facing each other. They sat down and devoured their IneaJ, dropping crumbs into the sofas and on the fioor. A radio perched on a windowsil1 was loudly advertising cars and David said he was going to get a car soon, a black SUV with a great sound system.

"Don 't hold yer breath, brother," said Tyler.

"What do you nlean?" said David. 52

"A job that pays something might be a good start. You 're already enough of a bloody menace on that bike of yours."

David started up from the sofa.

"You got something against my bike? Wolff gave me that bike and he' d have cut you in pieces with this dagger here in two seconds flat. Little tiny pieces, this big," he said, holding his thumb and finger barely apart and squinting.

Yannick made a calming gesture with his hands ..

"Okay okay, not the time to get him started," he said. "In fact it's time to move on." He looked meaningfully at Jean-François, who began to herd everyone out. David didn 't want to leave, but the others had been clearly ordered to take him away with them so that Yannick could be alone with Violet. Was this a regular agreel11ent they had with each other, did they take tums? An evil sweat glinted on

David' s billiardball forehead when he tumed to give Violet his dark narrow look as the others were manhandling hil11 out of the room. Beatrice cast an angry look at

Violet who was deliberately not getting up, and grimaced as she picked up her purse and put on her coat. Violet felt the split second of hesitation like a knife-edge.

Beatrice was getting the l11essage: leave. Violet let the hesitation pass and Beatrice left. Yannick and Violet were alone and her spirit soared. They were free. The question was no longer if, it was when. It was playtÏ1ne.

"Why are you friends with David?" asked Violet.

"It's a long story. It's a very long story."

"We've got time."

"He looks scary but he's not going to hurt you."

"Not sure about that." 53

"He' s just a bit possessive."

"Why? Is he gay?"

Yannick laughed. "No. He's just someone l know from my village. He's just a

bit different. Something went wrong when he was bom. Not enough oxygen or

something. He's okay really. He'll get used to you."

Forget David, she told herself. He 'lIget used ta yau meant Yannick was

planning to spend more time with her.

"Will Beatrice be okay with those guys?" she asked him. "She's my kid

cousin, you know. l have to look after her." He laughed at the question, and then she

did too, ruefully. They both knew it came too Jate to be honest. "No, really," she

said, begging him to play along.

"Of course she will. They're my buddies. Anyway, that's one that can look

after herselfby the looks ofher. Jean-François has the hots for her but he'll be too

shy to make a nl0ve."

"Where are they going?"

"Oh, back to the bar l guess. But they won 't be that long. We haven 't got too

l11uch ti111e before David drags them back. Which sofa do you like best?"

"They smell terrible."

"Where do you think they've been?"

"SI11ells like they first belonged to a dogs' home, then a bar for a few years, where people smoked on theI11 and spilt beer, then they were thrown out and sat in the rain for a few weeks."

"Not bad, not bad. They're family heirlooms and that pretty well sums up I11y family's history. But which One do you like best?" 54

"They're aIl the same, aren 't they?"

"The springs are best on this one," he said, grinning. "Better for bouncing up and down."

He had his arm around her now and that smeIl of wet wool was again against her face; she knew she couldn 't resist, had not even a single sliver of resistance in her. 1t had been too late as soon as she had not got up to leave with the others.

She looked up at the crucifix, at the plaster spurts ofblood standing out in relief from the holes in his body. She imagined someone painting them red, carefuIly, devoutly, with a tiny paintbrush.

She wondered if perhaps, when you made love, you really were joined to that person, forever, like her mum said, whether you felt anything for the person or not.

That llleant she was etemally, camally joined to, how rnany people now? Six, seven? EtemaIly. What would that mean? She saw herself sitting around a large table, bathed in a warm, intimate light, sharing a meal with everyone she had Illade ever love with. She was passing a cup around to them, and they were looking at one another, trying to figure out why they were there, and then it suddenly dawned on thern, what they ail had in cornIllon, and they laughed, and were ail happy together in being one flesh with her. Perhaps it was simply a question of an overdeveloped sense ofhospitality. COIne! You can ail share Illy flesh! There's plenty for everyone!

Pile in! And it's free!

But it would also Inean, ifyou break withthern, you are etemally maimed.

Such a simple thing, seXe Private parts aren 't more Illysterious, more ugly or more beautiful than any other part of the body, although perhaps a little more ridiculous, especially penises. Violet looked at them as she did naughty children, 55

funny and adorable and you can 't leave them alone because you want to see what funny things they'Il do next. Or you can get themall worked up and then leave the mayhem behind, like a bad babysitter.

Yet these were the bits that drove everyone around, aIl the time. Of all the people she knew, only her parents didn't seem to be driven by sex, and of course

Carmen, who had replaced it with crack. Perhaps even her parents were too, but it had S01ne different, contained quality. She remembered when she first leamed about sex and the horror she felt at what her parents must get up to jn the bedroom. She tried to imagine her father putting away his suit in the cupboard, hanging his tie carefully over the tie-rack, and then getting a big hard-on. Her pious mother, getting stiffly up from her knees after evening prayer and havin'g his swollen penis at eye level. Or perhaps she grabbed it while he was sitting on the side of the bed polishing his shoes? She had finally leamed to interpret that feeling she got when she passed by the closed door sometitnes. There was no telltale noise, but she felt a kind of secret heat coming through it and she felt cross and shut out.

"Let's take the bouncy one," she said. 56

Chapter 6

Death

The next moming David drove his motorcycle into the kitchen of the Presbytère. At

least he had the decency to open the front door first before he mounted the big

Yamaha that Wolff had given him and bounced up the front steps and into the hall.

Violet had left on the first ferry, hoping to get home before her parents woke up.

Yannick and Tyler were brewing the coffee and Jean-François was making toast

when David made his entry, spinning his wheels on the nevv'spaper and laughing

Inaniacally. On his helmet he'd painted hair the colour ofhis own, with the idea that

people wou Id think he wasn't wearing one. With his helmet overhanging his

eyebrows and his leathery flap of a lower lip overhanging his chin, his whole profile

was a grotesque series of terraces.

Jean-François had to fling himself against the fridge to avoid being run over.

SOlne idiot had given David ecstasy and he hadn 't slept aIl night. God knows what

else he'd got up to. Yannick couldn't trust them to keep him out of trouble, even for

a few hours.

"Have you fed your fish yet?" said Yannick casually.

"No," said David. "You do it for lne."

"Don't have time, l'ln gonna be Jate for vyork. That one looks as though it's being eaten."

David was breeding fish. The tank on the kitchen counter had separate sections with a young fish in each, and a stallion fish that he introduced into the breeding pens one at a time. Suddenly solicitous, he parked the motorcycle in the 57

large screened-in porch off the kitchen and tiptoed up to the tank, crouching. The

others turned from their coffees and their toast to watch.

"Bastard!" he yelled, stamping his foot and thumping the counter next to the

tank so that it gave a little leap. "He's fucked her to death and now he's eating her!"

"That's what happens when men get cooped up with their women too long,"

said Jean-François.

"What do you know," said Tyler, "you 've never been cooped up with a

woman for five Ininutes."

"Ha ha" said Jean-François, but David laughed, slapping his thigh, too loud,

too long.

"Oh God," said Tyler and got up to get ready to go. Yannick stared through

the lTIany tiny window panes of the presbytère kitchen at the clouds lTIassed over the

roofs below. Other people were having nonnal breakfasts without lTIotorcycles in

their kitchens. The priests who had lived here may have been forbidden to hump but

they didn 't have this to li;ve with. Any attempts to have ordinary conversations or

make a light joke in this house were stamped out by David's implacable literalness

or his prehistoric emotions. A shaft of sunlight pierced the burned toast smoke,

lighting up the murk of the fishtank and the half-devoured corpse of the female fish,

her white do\vny innards floating up to the surface. How long would his friends put up with living with David? Tyler had already said more than once that it was "like living in a fucking group home.

David worked in a cheese factory up at the hospital. It was a protected workshop for hospital outpatients, but even so he kept getting into tro~ble. He' d leave work and stay out all night, and then get delivered home by the police. 58

Yannick would hear the car arrive and see David climb out with a triumphant tilt to

his round head. The police officers would look doubtfully at the dilapidated

presbytère and reluctantly climb its ten front steps with the skateboard grind marks

down the wrought iron bannister, as ifthis were sorne practical joke and they were

about to be made fun of. When Yannick introduced himself as the responsable, they

looked even more confused.

"What is thisjoint? You sure you're old enough to take care ofhim?"

Sometimes Yannick had to take out the papers to prove to them he had la tutelle.

Finally he had given up his job in a shop on the ~ue Saint-Jean where they sold

expensive skulls, swords, fake-pewter dragons and spell-books, and got a job at the

hospital instead to be closer to his brother. To his surprise, he liked it and was good

at it. It was like being surrounded by Davids, but without being responsible for

thenl. He knew how to talk to thelTI. And there was no cool to try to hold up. The hospital to sorne seemed like a prison, but to hÎ1TI the real prison was cool. In the prison of cool there were laws about everything you wore, the way you spoke, th~ music you listened to, the eut ofyour hair-and a ruthless cruelty towards the law- breakers.

"Have you got your lunch ready?" said Yannick.

"No, can you do it for me?"

"Get it yourself! You 're not a kid anynlore!"

But he' d said that too lTIany times.

"1 f you weren 't so busy with your crack whore you' d have plenty of time to make both," said David. ~ -- ~ -- ~ -~ - ---

1 1 59 1

Yannick was worried. David was not up to a day ofwork today. Ifthey saw the state he was in they might do a urine test, feel he needed better encadrement and admit him. But he, Yannick, was damned ifhe was going to miss work again to keep David at home. His heart sank as he thought of Violet. Couldn't he have a life, just one evening of pleasure, more than pleasure! She lnade him laugh, she was beautiful, she seemed to like him. But he wasn't allowed more than one briefhit of her at a time. He was a prisoner, after aIl.

At night on the farm he used to hear David rubbing his feet together. It was the only way the poor guy could stay still long enough to fall asleep~ In the morning

David would light a cigarette and stride down to the barn, leaving a trail of smoke in the co]d air. He would fling his big head back like a horse, suddenly struck by sorne angry thought. His anger seemed to be inexhaustible, always bubbling up again like an evi] spring. Yannick had no idea where it came fronl. But he had lived with it a11 his life. David' s anger made Wolfflaugh, it delighted him, he encouraged it and tried to lnake David lose control. Wolffwas his mother's husband. Yannick wouldn 't ev en call hÎln his stepfather, because his lnother hadn 't really chosen

Wolff: he'djust simply moved in from the farm workshop to the house when their father died. Wolff seelned to like David' s company, lnost of the tÎlne, and tolerated hÏJ11 being around hi111 better than Yannick did. Yannick would come in and Wolff would be working away on the McCormick, grunting to hÎlnself in German, and

David would be standing beside him, watching and sl11oking, cracking feeble jokes to try to get Wolffs attention". When Wolffleft after their mother died, he gave 60

David his motorbike. Out of guilt, Yannick supposed, never intending to see him agaln.

When Yannick complained to his mother about David, she would say,just keep loving. It's not easy, she said, but it's the only way. The other way is death.

And Yannick would say, you don 't know, you don't have to be his brother.

What about now? he wanted to shout at her. How can l love him now? And now?

He remembered the day before the auctioneers were coming to the farm, he and David had dragged the cOlnpr~ssor down to the barn to clean the squeeze chute.

The squeeze chute was what they called the pen where they put the steers when they castrated and dehorned them, all in one bloody afternoon and with large sharp instruments and alnple use of the cattleprod. Amazing those po or bastards ever recovered, but they did; the next afternoon they' d be kicking up their heels again at him and David again as they bedded down the pen, gory dark red holes where their horns used to be and streaks of dried blood running down their faces.

Under the squeeze chute was a pit into which poured aIl the blood and manure during the operation, and when it was·full you had to empty it. Now it was waist deep. Yannick unscrewed the boards over the pit, handing the screws to

David one by one. David tried to Inake a cigarette and dropped the whole lot into the pit, including the screws.

"You jerk!"

"My cigarette Inachine!"

"Fuck the cigarettes! You lost the screws!"

"1 didn 't do it on purpose!" 61

"Well you can find them!"

"We'll find them when it's empty!"

They set about scooping out the liquid manure with buckets, taking turns

carrying the buckets into the barnyard to dump them. The cattle stood watching

them with lowered heads. Soon David said he'd only carry, not scoop. Yannick was

standing in the pit up to his knees in stinking green liquid, sweaty slime running

down his face. He looked at David through the blurr.

"Okay, but get on with it, take the buckets out of here and dump it on the

pile."

"No," said David. He was carrying two full buckets. "1 think 1' 11 put them

back in here." And he dUlllped them back into the pit.

"What did you do that for!" shouted Yannick.

"Just to see you mad," said David, taking a step backwards, smiling.

Yannick pul1ed himself upright. David was fiddling with the cattle prod on the wall

behind hÏ111. Yannick kept working, trying to ignore David. He concentrated fiercely

on channel1ing his rage through his arms and legs into his work. Finally the pit was

el11pty enough to be able to clean it with the airhose.

"Y ou do this bit at least," said Yannick, handing the hose to David and

squatting to search the bottom of the pit for the screws. His head was pressed against the side of the pit as he felt around in the thick silt at the bottom. He found the cigarette machine and the plastic package of tobacco and slapped them on the side of the pit. David snatched them, rubbed them on his pants and pushed them back into his pants pocket. Yannick kept feeling for the screws~ 62

Suddenly David tumed on the compressor. Pressing the airhose in Yannick's

ear he squirted a piercing jet of ice-cold air into it.

"What the fuck are you doing, asshole!" screamed Yannick, jumping out of

the pit and lunging at David. But he stopped in time, and grabbed the compressor

instead. David was laughing, his great belly-shout of a laugh, the laugh he used

when he was watching the wrestling on TV on Saturday lTIomings and saw someone

getting his head stamped on. Yannick tumed and began to drag the cOlnpressor back

up to the shop. He walked as fast as he could, but David was following him,

laughing, dancing on his toes, dancing rings around hi m, his great belly shoved out,

his vest with the oil stains dripping across his bel1y.

"1 w.anted to hear you swear really bad," he was saying.

"Why," said Yannick dully. "Why?"

"1 dunno." It had been much worse since their mother got i11 with cancer. lt was as if David was asking to get beaten up.

His mother always told Yannick that David did things like that to lTIake sure

Yannick Ioved hilTI, which made Yannick's guts twist in frustration. Later he heard

David at the kitchen table making cigarettes, while she lay talking to him through the doorway from the sofa in the porch under her crocheted blanket. Yannick could hear David snap the cigarette machine shut and the cigarette shoot out of the end.

She was trying to give hÏJn a pep talk for life. Not to steal, not to hurt anyone, to be good to his brother, to try to lTIake the best of himself, Iike a beautiful tree that grows up to its full height. 63

"Mum, l can 't ever be a tree, said David simply. "1've been cut down. When

a tree is cut down it can 't never be a tree again, it can only be a bush. 1'11 try to be a

bush, though."

Yannick heard his Inother's voice tremble.

"Yes, David. Vou do that. You're a good boy, and Yannick's a good boy,

and l want you two to look after each other."

Yannick was touched, in spite ofhimself, that David was aware he had to

live a eut-down life. And hi s mother's words soaked into him like water into

parched earth, Yannick 's a good boy .

Was he a good boy now? Whenever Yannick thought about Violet,

eventually his thoughts would sidle back to his mother's drawn face as she was

dying in the hospital, grotesque in her supplication. She had brought a sInall

suitcase, and a clock, and SOlne night dresses. Her beautifullong hair stuck out

around her head like stiff plumage, splayed against the pillow. They hadn 't let her wear her own nightdress but had put her in a hospital gown with little white ties at the back that failed to cover her backside and the diaper she wore. Just because she was sick they seemed to think they could truss her up like an old bird. Her shoulder bones stuck out like wishbones, ready to snap, and her chest was nothing but a ribcage with blue skin pulled taut around it. Her body was only bones and skin, skin and bones. lt really can happen.

He heard her voice. He leaned down because she could only whisper. Now it's your tum, she was saying. l can't do it any more. T'm going. Wolff can 't do it, he doesn 't understand hÎln. So promise Ine Yannick. Promise you '11 take care of him. 64

He knew she would hold on until he promised. She would hold on even after she died. So he had promised. And then she had nodded, and squeezed his hand, and stopped breathing. It happened slowly. He waited, waited for each new breath to keep his mother alive for sorne more minutes, praying that she would take another breath, holding his own breath to see if that would help. But she was leaving him behind, and finally no more breaths had come. He had lost her. She' d gone somewhere else.

He looked at her face and saw a look of relief on it, to have left this old bonerack behind. But he couldn 't see her as finished, not her self. Was there any difference between a person' s body and their own self? He kept trying to think what this scene reminded him of, and then he remembered, and was astonished. It was like the feeling he got when a new ca]fwas born in the barn, sliding out onto the dirty straw in a river ofblood and water, aIl wet and weak and ugly. They ail nearly die, and then somehow they don 't, they grope through feebly to the other side. It was dangerous and frightening, but it wasn 't either a beginning or an end. He went home to milk the cow.

He didn 't turn on the lights in the barn. He knew the path through the corridors only too weIl, past the grinder, past the bullpens, stepping over the manure canals, snlelling the haydust and the sileage, listening for the rattle of stanchions. ln those last days of sickness and fear, the chores were what kept him sane. You stil1 had to bed the pens, you still had to milk the cow.

When the cow heard him she stood up and stretched, and when he sat down on the milking stoo] he saw sonlething in the flattened straw that looked like a glove. He reached down to pick it up, but 1t was furry, and he pulled out a dead

------' 65

kitten. It had come too close and when the cow lay down she'd squashed it. It was his fault. Every night the kittens waited for him to tip sorne milk into an old hubcap for them. He used to fold a teat and squirt thern in the face, and then watch them lick each other' s faces clean, then settle down, pu11ing their little paws under thel11selves to watch hirn again, drawing slowly nearer. Tonight he swatted-them away. They scampered off in surprise and then turned looked at him, their pupils shrinking to tiny ovals. "Look!" he said roughly, grasping the dead kitten and holding it up to show them. "Look what happens! Don't get close!"

There used to be about twenty cats in attendance around the milking stool.

But a rabid skunk got into the barn and aIl the cattle had to be put in quarantine, and

Wolff and David went about killing a11 the cats in case they had rabies too. The four ofthem tried to run the farm after his father died, but his mother was i11 , David was unreliable and Wolffwas more of a rnechanic than a farnler. He liked hammering and bashing things, not growing thel11. He killed sorne of the cats with a pitchfork.

David preferred to catch them with a landing net and put them in a sack with a heavy stone in it. Then he paddled out into the rniddle of the pond in Wolffs canoe and dropped the sack overboard. Now that the cats were gone, there were more and l110re rats. Wolffkilled those with a pitchfork too. He'd surprise them coming up the ramp from the chicken run.

Yannick pressed his head into the cow's warm flank, washed offher udder, and started l11ilking, the rhythl11 calming his rising panic, the jets of milk pinging against the side of the bucket. His fingers were strong, he could milk her dry in six nlinutes. But tonight he nlade it last longer. What was he going to do, the family had 66

now exploded. His mother was dead, Wolff would take off any day soon, and

Yannick would be left with David.

The farm was already owned by the bank after their mother had borrowed

too much a few years before, at the bidding of a small man in a shiny suit who came

to talk to them, throwing open a smart leather briefcase on the kitchen table and

showing them pieces ofpaper with numbers on them. They were overawed by that

briefcase - that was their mistake. Then as soon as they'd signed for the Joan,

interest rates had gone up and they couldn 't pay them.

He'd have to take David away. They' d seek their fortune like Hanse] and

Gretel. If only there was a traiI through the woods, a trail of stones he could follow.

A bird that would tell him \vhat to do, where to go. If only this was aIl just a fairy

tale, like the ones his father used to tell theln.

The only other thing he remembered ofhis father was that at night he'd hear

him closing the stove down, the sharp squeal as he spun the cast-iron wheel vents

with a poker. Then after a while, his great roar of a snore. He couldn 't remelnber his

father's face, but now he asked him, because he didn't know who else to ask, what to do. Could you help Ine, he said politely. l'II miss this, he told his father. The cow, the cow's warm side, the slnell of the warm milk, the kittens.

At the funeral a whole lot of people showed up that Yannick had never met.

Did they cOlne from the bank? Was that the man from the grain exchange? The slaughter house WOlnan? David clung to Yannick and for once he was grateful.

David was his screen, his excuse for not having to talk to aIl these people trying so hard to look solemn and kind. For once David made no noise, but tears flowed down his face aIl day. There was another woman there a bit Iike David, Patsy 67

Levesque. When she met them after the service she lifted her hand in the air in a

high arc, as a queen might do, and looked at them bravely out of the corner of her

eye. She was the one who had crocheted their mother's blanket, and had also

hooked the rug that was in their entranceway; she told David. She didn 't mind that

he said nothing in return, just stared at her with his swollen eyes.

"Will you come to the graveyard with us?" asked Yannick.

" NO!" she shouted.

"But you'd be very welcome," said Yannick, "you could come in our car

with us."

"YES!" Patsy had shouted again, and ran to get her coat She held

Yannick's other hand as they walked down the cemetery road to the grave, and

Yannick was happy to have his hands held by David and Patsy. But when the coffin

went down into the hole, Yannick felt a falling in the insides of himself. His mother

was leaving him. She was going under the ground now, she would be gone. He

clutched David and uttered a half-sob, and David put his hand on the back of

Yannick's neck, the way he would grasp a calfto guide it to its lTIother's teat, and

leaned the side of his head against David' s shoulder. After they had thrown handfuls of dirt on the grave, the undertaker M. Lachance asked David ifhe'd like a flower to throwon.

"Oh yes," he said, the first time he'd spoken aIl day. He took the rose from

M. Lachance and then lay down on the ground next to the grave, and reached out across the void to Iay the rose on his mother's coffin. He was teetering on the edge of the grave and a gasp went up - he looked as though he would fall in. Yannick had to turn away, he couldn't bear the thought ofhaving to pull David out ofhis 68

mother's grave. But he didn 't have to: Patsy was down there pulling David back

and away from the grave in time. David got up slowly, with a doleful sigh of

interrupted intimacy, and Patsy bent over to brush the mud off his knees. Then M.

Lachance gave Patsy a rose too, perversely, as though he wanted her to fall in too.

She held it crookedly in her hand and smiled around at themall while they waited,

but she didn't throw it in. It seemed she wasn 't going to throw good money away

after bad. Later on their way back to the cars she stuffed it in her handbag and it

broke, but M. Lachance didn 't see that.

People kept asking Yannick, what are you going to do now?

Nothing, Yannick kept saying. Because he didn 't know. Wolffwas already

making himself scarce. Yannick caught a few glimpses of him at the funeral but

he' d already disappeared by the time they got to the cemetery.

Then M. Lachance had come up to Yannick and said that ifthey didn't want to go back to the fafIn, he knew a priest who knew a place in Léviswhere they might be able to stay.

"What shall we do, David?" asked Yannick.

"Let's get out ofhere," he said.

* * *

"So how was she?" asked David, leering at his fish.

"Never mind." Yannick stuffed half a bag ofbagels and a tub of cream cheese into David' s backpack. He' d go without, but at work that young nerdy 69

security guy by the electric doors would give him a can of coke, and the Casse-

Croute woman would slip him une pointe de pécane.

"l've a mind to try that one myself," said David, still gazing into his tank.

"You touch her you 're dead. You hear? Dead."

"Easy, easy, brother. l was talking about my fishy fishy." He laughed and

spun around, suddenly full of energy.

"Come on, let's go. 1'11 give you a lift on my bike."

"We can 't go to work on your bike. It' s already too icy."

"Watch me."

It was an old diIelnma. Let David do it, risk him falling and killing himself

or someone eIse. Or stop him, nagging and bullying and eventually shouting.

Locking up the bike and hiding the key. And as usual, they'd be late ifthey took the

bus. Should Yannick take the bus anyway? Why did he have to do this? It wasn 't fair. Let him go, let him die. Let them both die, what the hello

"l'Il take a ride, sure." He puIled out his skateboard.from among a pile of boots and coats on the kitchen floor. He' d go down after work and see jf she was there again.

David threw his anns around Yannick and kissed hÏ1n. Held him too tight, too long, always, always too long. He blew kisses to his fish, tightened his painted hehnet, jutted out his chin, and pushed his motorbike down the backsteps into the yard, ploughing it through the deep snow out to the driveway with frightening ease. 70

Chapter 7

Dust

Violet got off the ferry too late to make it before her parents woke up. She walked along Petit Champlain, the cobblestones glistening in the cold mist. The street was empty, too early for the tourists to be up. She was hungry. Overpriced clothing stores were advertising for sales girls for the Christmas holiday tourist season.

Perhaps she should drop the cafeteria work: it wasn't the best place to meet people.

Instead she could seIl those jackets with polar bears on them, or the fuzzy woollen ones with embroidered igloos, to American tourists. She would meet sorne

American millionaire and flirt with him right under his fat wife's nose. They'd spend a night in the Chateau and then she'd run away with him, leaving the wife in her polar bear coat with her Inuit carvings. She could arrange them on the glass coffee table in the living room back in New HalTIpshire, aIl by herself. Live free or die.

She still had $2 for the funiculaire. She couldn 't face walking up the Côte de la Montagne, past the sex shops with their bad jokes and bongs and dildos and condoms and aIl the paraphemalia of what her life had become. She paid her money and took the lift, which started to climb slowly and silently up the almost vertical rai ls towards the Dufferin Terrace above. The poison ivy and Manitoba maple shrubs on the cliffwere beginning to look defeated under the new snow. Perhaps the funiculaire wouId crash this tinle, Iike it did a few years ago with a11 those AlTIerican tourists on board, kilIing a pile of thelTI. Then she wouldn 't have to face home, her father, her lTIother, the silence, the - then she remembered, Carmen was back!

------71

Thank God Carmen was back, and Violet had somewhere to go before she had to be at work in an hour.

Carmen hugged her at the door.

"Y ou okay?" said Violet.

"Yup. This is really it now. Another three weeks oftreatment and 1'11 be as good as new."

Carmen took Violet into the kitchen and took her face in her hands. "And you?"

"Well, you know, living at home is stilllike living in a rnortuary."

"Oh l know, your rnother still trying to refonn us aIl. Now help me with thi s cigarette, will you, sweet?" Carmen said, holding a cigarette in her mouth with trernbling hands while Violet lit it for her. "Been up aIl night, can 't sleep. It's the drugs. You get off one and they put you on others. What you gain in the Our F athers you lose in the Hail Marys. Am l glad to be home. But my God, girl, you look a sight. What on earth have you been up to this tÏIne. Beatrice and Tom aren 't up yet,

BEATRICE AND TOM!" she yelled. "YOU'LL BE LA TE!"

Beatrice and Tom were in that briefwindow oftÏlne when they were allowed to be children again, sleeping in, counting on their mother. For Violet too, these were the best of times. It might not last long (but perhaps this time it would!

You had to think like Tom and not Beatrice) but they would a11 make the lnost of it.

Carmen lent Violet sorne thick grey sweatpants, and then they stood together over the stove, pouring milk for hot chocolate into a saucepan. The steam of the milk on the edge of the pan brought back so nlany lnomings over hot chocolate with

Carmen, on her way home for Jnore grief froln her father. Carmen at her best was -- --~------

72

the very best. The things they talked about in this kitchen. Things that in her house

were buried, battened down, locked up, chained and bolted. Cannen would slnoke

and listened and smoke sorne more. She'd laugh and exclaim in her hoarse crow-

like voice, and she' d weep. The tears poured silently from her eyes. Crying was so

nonnal for Carmen that you could cry with her and there would be no big deal made

of it, and then you could go on your way, having mixed your tears with hers on the

stovetop in a companionable blurr of comfort.

When Beatrice caJne in, Violet looked up guiltily.

"It's okay," said Beatrice. "1 made it hOlne without you. Just remind me not

to go out with your friends again." Violet took a deep breath. Perhaps Beatrice let

her off 1ightly because she felt guilty about the ferry deck.

"Violet, are you leading my girl astray?" said Carmen.

"She' s going there a11 by herself," said Beatrice; lighting a cigarette off her

mother's. "} guess that guy David was leering at youse through the bedposts a11 night long."

"Whereabouts in Lévis does this guy live, your friend?" asked Carmen.

"Lévis. In an old presbytère," said Violet.

"That where you 've been aIl night?"

"Yup."

"Ah, 1 see. Won't your mother just love that."

"What?"

"Just tell her that you 've been shagging your boyfriend in the presbytère and see what she says." 73

"Don 't be ridiculous Mum," said Beatrice. "Aunt Maude doesn 't know what

shagging means. Sorne kind of carpet treatment."

"Why? Has Mum g9t sorne skeleton in the closet 1 should know about?"

asked Violet.

"1 don't know about skeletons in the closet, but she' s got a crateful ofbones

in the living room," said Carmen.

"God, l know," said Violet. "It's so embarassing."

"Can 't be as bad as having this as a l11other," said Beatrice, putting her arm

around her mother' s shoulders.

"Try having one who carries human bones around in her pockets," said

Violet, "whispering to them and staring into space."

"You should understand that," said Carmen, "you people wear tee-shirts

with skeletons on them and make yourselves up to look like corpses. Obsessed with

dead bodies."

"What about you Catholics and the eucharist, then," said Beatrice.

"At least that's in the privacy ofyour own church," said Violet.

"Yes, but it's still eating and drinking from someone's body. Catholics are

a)] cannibals at heart. Vou 're right, Violet, your MUl11 is a freak and a cannibal."

"Why so· squeal11ish about cannibalism all of a sudden, darling," said

Carmen cOl11placently, pouring them out three steallling mugs ofhot chocolate.

Violet tiptoed into the kitchen just as her father was wiping his thin greasy

lips with a voluptuous damask table napkin. He was surrounded by pieces of paper with tiny writing a11 over them, spattered with drops of grease and cold egg-yolk. 74

Catching sight of her, he slowly put the napkin down and folded his arms. Violet

launched herself towards the stairs but he put out an arm to block her. AIl she

wanted was to get into her room and just think a bit and remember things and be in

love and figure out what to do about Yannick and David and then sleep. Sleep. Her

bones were weary with making love and fending offhate.

She braced for the usual questions, tried not to look at the eyes slitting with

repressed fury.

"Not so fast, girl. Aren 't you going to bother with sorne sort of

explanation?"

"Oh for God's sake. l'm seventeen years old."

"Old enough, you' d think, to make sorne attempt to consider other people

for a change. Your mother hasn 't had a wink of sleep. Again." His sad hairy hands

trembled as they lay there on the smutty dog-eared pieces of paper.

"She shouldn 't worry about me so much. l'nl old enough to look after

myself."

Her father's mouth narrowed until it resembled a prune and he thulnped the

table, rattling his coffee cup. His face was getting purple.

"You may have abandoned your education, like a fool, but as long as you 're

living under this roofyou fol1ow the rules ofthis house. You know what they are.

Honle at eleven or you're grounded."

"Don 't forget the one about using a c]ean spoon in the jaln."

"Y ou 're grounded."

"You can 't do that!" protested Violet, listening curiously to the sound ofher voice rising to match his. "} wasn 't doing anything bad, l was just with friends. " 75

"1 don't want to hear any more about it," he said, getting up to leave. "1

really don't." He collected up his papers and snapped them into his new purple

moulded-plastic briefcase, which Violet now saw for the first time.

"Oh my God, that is so VILE!" she shrieked theatrically, the shock of the

new briefcase throwing aIl other outrages into the shade. "Why do you keep trying

to make the students think you 're young? It' s so pathetic."

"Pathetic is what you 're going to end up, a drug-stunned sex-minded idiot,"

he said coldly, flicking his eyes up at her, "addicted for life and probably robbing

your parents blind for your next hit. l know what those bloodshot eyes mean! You

can't fool me!" Specks of foam were gathering wretchedly around the edges of his

mouth.

"Dad, settle down! What do you think I am! You read one stupid article

about teenagers in one of your boring magazines and you think l'm a drug addict

and a sex-maniac! Try and apply a little critical thinking for a change!"

"Grounded for a week, and in addition, memorize this poem," he said, throwing a piece of paper down on the table. "It's called Kubla Khan. You might even understand it: Coleridge wrote it when he was on drugs."

"No way. I 'm not reading the stupid pOelTI and l'm not staying in any more. l 'm fed up with getting out by clÏlnbing down the drain. It hurts. fr01TI now on I 'm walking out the door."

"If you walk out the door, you can just stay out," shouted Reggie. "Y ou can get out and stay out!"

"Okay," said Violet very quietly. "1'11 just leave DOW," She backed up towards the door and took her coat off the hook. At that moment the door o"pened 76

and Maude walked in, wild-eyed, as if she'd been having the same kind ofnight

Violet had had.

"Where are you going, girl?" she said.

"} 'ru leaving. l've been kicked out."

"Oh no, you haven't," said Maude. She tumed to look at Reggie. He was

standing aghast, his mouth in a wide glittering gape. "1 'm your mother and 1 say

you're staying." She stood like a statue, blocking the door and staring past Violet at

Reggie.

"l'm not living in a house where there's a box of old bones rotting in the

living room," said Violet.

"They're not any old bones. They're relics. Father Hormidas left them to us in his will."

"Us? You, don't you mean? And why did he leave them to you?"

"} have no idea, darling. Just take off that coat now and stay a while."

Violet looked at her father but his face was impassive. She ran over to the crate, threw the flowers on the floor, ripped the netty lace off the top and pulled off the lido

"Don't!" cried her mother. "Leave thel11 alone!"

"What is a11 this stuff? It's disgusting!" She began to pull thel11 out and throw them around. Sorne of packets burst as they hit the floor and walls in little puffs of dust. Fralnes broke, scrolls of yellowed paper rolled under the sofa.

"They're dead people! Mum, you're sick! You're worse than Dad!" Her father stumbled forward into the room as Maude knelt down painfully and began to pick up the packets off the floor and rewrap them with trembling hands. 77

When Violet saw her father stoop down to help, she ran out of the room. At least she'd hoped he would slap her mother's face, or they'd shout at each other about him kicking her out, or something. She wanted it all out, all burst, over. She ran upstairs past the boxroom, locked her door and threw herself on her bed. She let the anger ripple through her. And aIl they could do was get down on the floor together like two beggars scrabbling for the coins she threw at them. Robbing thenl blind to pay for her addictions! Her old man was an idiot. All he can think of is

Coleridge. And her mother! Instead of burying them decently she was fondling those bon es as if they were her lost children. 78

Chapter 8

Blood

Maude had now worked her way through St. Roch, St. Anne the grandmother of the

Lord (Reggie even drove her out to St. Anne de Beaupré, treating it graciously Iike

an ordinary request such as wanting to visit an old aunt), and had finally landed up

on Mary, as she always had as a child, and as Martha had originally suggested.

What' s more Mary could be visited just around the corner at the Monastery of the

Frères du Sacré Coeur de Marie, in a little room aIl of her own.

The Mary at the monastery was one of the regular blue ones on a white

pedestal, with electronic haloes of lights around her, a few of which were always

bumt out. Mr Daigle the sexton ought to start shopping at Costco, she thought,

where he could get lightbulbs in bulk. The problem was he never bought l110re than

one packet at a time and you just couldn't keep up that way. But anyway the Mary

Maude knew didn 't look a bit like that Mary, standing there in her dim plaster

indifference. The one who showed up was as often as not a little Palestinian woman, tough as old boots, with a dark, angular face and a black cloak, who didn't mince her words. That's the one to WhOlll she'd been talking about Violet.

How would you deal with Violet? Maude said to Mary. What did you do when you found Jesus with a packet of condoms in his pocket? Okay, they didn 't have condoms in those days. But he did behave in a strikingly adolescent way at times. What about when he disappeared for three days? And acted like his parents should have known where he was. And when you asked him to deal with the wine situation at that wedding, he was very rude before he finally agreed to help out. 79

Perhaps Mary remembered the time when Jesus was still a child and not yet a rude grownup saviour. She must remember the days when they lay curled up in bed together talking, about everything. The smell ofhis clean hair, his toes wriggling between her calves, rubbing his nose on hers, pulling at her hand and putting it under his cheek, and finally falling quiet.

Gradually Violet had stopped telling Maude what she was thinking. A few years ago she would find little bits of despair written in a notebook: "l'm hoplis. Wy a my hoplis? Becouls l'm horeb1." Catherine's demons must have been feeding her that kind of crap! Or was l too hard on her? And the poignancy of her spell ing, because although they spoke English at home she'd only ever studied in French.

And then finally there were no confidences any more at aIl, just dreams, for Violet had never stopped telling Maude her dreams. Over the breakfast table, while Reggie read the paper or l11uttered to ~imself and shuffled bits of paper around trying to organize his 1110ming lectures, Violet told her nlother her dreams.

Did Jesus tell his dreams to Mary, while Joseph was sharpening his tools for the day's work, and did she ponder aIl these things in her heart? What did Jesus dream about? Maude had leamed to read Violet's dreallls as a kayaker reads white wat~r, as a river pilot reads the tides and cun~ents. It was aIl she had to go on. Joseph would surely have paused his planing or quietly put down his saw and hstened: he was a great believer in dreams. It was only because of a drealll that he didn't ditch

Mary when she got pregnant and told him that unlikely story, "Mais c'était le pigeon, Joseph!" He brought the family back from Egypt aIl because of a dream.

But luckily these days people didn't take dreams so seriously. So Maude could behave as if it were just a casual thing, what Violet was telling her. Something to 80

laugh over as she poured out the coffee, stirred the cream of wheat, flipped the eggs,

and Violet never seemed to suspect that she was laying herself bare to ,her mother.

But then, in the last few weeks, even that had gone. Maude and Reggie hardly saw

Violet anymore. "Mary Mother of God and Joseph his father, for pity's sake take

care of the child," she said aloud.

* * *

"It a11 has to be completely secret," said Violet. "If my mum knew, she' d

send me to sorne sort ofFallen Women Asylum with nuns praying for my saIvation

while they make me do the laundry aIl day. My dad would kick me out of the house

again."

"And Mum will go on a crack spree," said Beatrice, so that Violet didn 't

have to say it. Beatrice and Violet were sitting in the waiting room of the CLSC.

Telling Beatrice was the only thing Violet could think to do when the little white

stick from the phannacy had told her that she was pregnant. 1t showed red lines.

One red line nleans you 're not, two red lines mean you are.

When she was a child she had had a Chinese friend, Nelson, who Iived on

St-Vallier Street, above SOlne sort of club where the Chinese played Mah Jong for high stakes, sometimes gambling their restaurants away. When Violet visited one time, NeIson's grandmother Mrs Wong had tossed yarrow sticks on the table and then looked at the way the sticks fel1. She tilted her head quizzically to one side, the flesh on her cheeks twitching slightly as if a breeze had passed over a pond, and told

Violet she would have seven children. 8]

N ow it was two red lines that defined her future, but instead of being in a

gambling den with a wise old WOll1an, she found out she was pregnant sitting on a

toilet sticking her hand with the little stick in it into her own piss. AIl by herself.

Her hand covered in piss.

In spite of the weeks of comparative silence that lay between them like a

running sore, there was only one thing to do, and that was to tell Beatrice. There

were secrets that could be used as currency, and now there was this one, in a new

category, one that she was even keeping from herse]f. Beatrice didn't crow when

Violet told her. She behaved as she behaved when Carmen was in crisis, with a kind

of cool brisk calm. AIl it took to tum the tables, thought Violet, was for me to be the

one in trouble.

Beatrice took Violet on the bus to the CLSC. They have everything there,

she said, social workers, nurses, psychologists, doctors. After telling Beatrice,

Violet had stopped talking aItogether. She was afraid a great howl of anguish would

come out if she opened her mouth. Or perhaps what she had to say n1ustn 't be said,

because then she would know what it was. Even that thought she steered away froln,

she forced her mind into a yellow blank. Don 't ask for explanations, don 't try to

understand.

She saw herself as a ghost trapped eternally between two red lines. She thought of the red lines running down Jesus' arms that night six weeks ago, as she

layon that stinking sofa with Yannick. She' d thought of the COndOll1S in her pocket, for which she had spent two weeks grounded, but she'd not dare get them out, because she didn't want him to think that horrible rubbery technical details could be 82

more important to her than passion, than him. Precautions. The word alone was

despicable. Precautions against love.

WeIl now she was in the CLSC with its grey waIls and its smell of antiseptic

and its posters showing people in wheelchairs competing at the handicapped

olympics. Posters showing people getting tetanus shots, smiling nurses, happy

children wearing clean clothes in the sun. No blood, no secrets. WeIl at least now

she knew, she knew, after convincing herself for so long that it wasn 't true, that she

must have miscalculated, that perhaps her perjods were still irregular, that, that, that

- but there were more thoughts lurking there that she did not allow into her mind at

aIl. When her mind got close to those ones, it said no no no no no no no no, so she

never quite got there. The nurse at the CLSC was a small woman with a triangular

face and bobbed hair held back by a beaded hairband who led her into her cramped

little office and sat her down in a chair, much too close. There was a box of kleenexes on a table beside them. She loathed her for having that box of paper tissues there. But thank God there was no need for them after aIl.

"Y ou have three options," the woman said in a no-nonsense kind ofway.

"You can have the baby and keep it, you can have the baby and give it up for adoption, or you can have an abortion. You 'Il have to discuss it with your partner and then decide quickly. Don 't leave it too long - it's already late. l will help you with whatever choice you l11ake."

But Violet would not discuss it with her partner. After the one night they had spent alone together, Yannick had not seemed to want to detach hÏJllself from that

David guy. Every time they met, David was there, growling like a watchdog. Violet was afraid of him and didn 't understand why Yannick was with hÎ111. She had 83

stopped calling him, and then he didn 't try to get hold of her either, so that clinched

it. Where was Yannick now? He was either with David sornewhere, or probably off

with one ofthose girls at Place d'youville. Or back with that girl at the bar in Lévis.

She had given herself to Yannick. Precautions had not been taken. Thinking

of those other girls was a technique to help her pack herself up and take herself

back. And now she had to reinhabit her heart and then harden it, deve]op sorne scar

tissue. She'd done this before, it was hard, but things were gradual1y getting back to

being what they real1y were again - the orange upholstered chair she was sitting

on, the bulge of her thigh in her jeans, the nurse's earnest sal10w face. She no longer

saw it as a scene, with him in the audience, and herself on centre stage in an aura of

delicate light, a pers on who was beautiful and interesting even to herself. That

vision he'd lent her was gone forever - she'd left those colours and stories and any

caring about anything behind, with him.

Her parents wouJd never know about this. Rer lTIother was worried that she

wasn 't speaking but perhaps afterwards she'd be able to again, norrnally. She didn't even need to ask herself the nurse's question, let alone ask Yannick. The answer was the only thing she could hear. It was like when she'd overdosed on anti- inflamnlatories one time: the ringing in her ears blocked out everything else anyone rnight be trying to say. AlI she could hear was no no no no no no no no no.

"1 already know," she said. "It's the third choice." If she waited too long the ringing might stop and then she' d have to choose what voice to listen to.

"If you 're sure about that l'll make an appointment for you right away" said the woman, reaching over the tissues to pick up the phone. 84

* * *

It was snowing again and Violet stood waiting for the lights to tum. The smell of alchohol drifted over on the breath of a man next to her who wore muddy snowpants and carried three plastic bags. He tumed to look at her with placid watery eyes and she tumed away.

The clinic squatted complacently on the other side of the street. Beyond it the bare dogwood and willow and maple saplings on the vacant lot glowed red and yellow and grey through the falling snow. Violet rested her eyes on them, trying to let them give her strength, the strength ofher childhood, aIl the good powers she had known.

Just before the light tumed, another man came up and stood beside her wearing a white coat with a stethescope hanging out of the pocket. He was carrying a submarine wrapped in wax paper and dripping mustard on to the ground. He had big ruddy cheeks and the remains of a cheerful smile on him, as though he had ju~t shared a good joke with someone and was still amused. He was in the middle of his robust life and bursting with confidence about his future and she hated him. She knew that this was the man who was going to do it. 1 cauld be anyane. He daesn Jt knaw what he is abaut ta da ta the persan standing next ta him at the trajJic lights.

He daes it aIl daYJ every day. They crossed the street and entered together through the electric doors without him looking at her once.

* * *

When she woke up she was having agonizing cramps and moaning in pain.

She was lying in a bed in what seemed to be in a small ward with several other 85

women stretched out near her in various stages of consciousness. After a few Inore minutes a woman came swimming towards her through soupy green light, and put a styrofoam cup oftea on the bedside table.

"Comment ça va?"

''l've got a tummy ache" she sobbed.

"T'as des crampes abdominales. C'est tout à fait normal," she said. "Prends ton temps. Bois ton thé tranquillement. Tu vas partir dans une demi-heure." Then she left.

The woman next to her was telling her something but Violet couldn 't hear.

'She was still deep, deep down sOlnewhere, floating to the surface. Finally she was able to reach for her tea. She turned to the woman.

"What?"

"It's the drugs they give you," said the woman. "They make you have contractions." The tea woman came back.

"Assieds-toi icitte, cinq Ininutes." Violet struggled out of bed in her green hospital gown open at the back and sat down obediently on the wooden chair beside the bed. The wOlnan in the next bed had already gone. There was an appall ing bunched up feeling in between her legs. She sat there, waiting for instructions. Five minutes later the tea woman was back, carrying Violet's clothes.

"Prends tes vêtelnents. Tu vas changer dans les toilettes et pis tu peux partir," she said. Violet stood up and tottered into the washrooms, clutching her little heap of clothes.

There was no one else there. The reflection in the mirror showed only her, ghostly and alone. She shut herself in a cubicle and took off her gown. A huge 86

sanitary napkin, more like a diaper, was thrusting her legs apart. When she took her underpants down to urinate, it seemed like a wave ofblood was unleashed. It felt like a cry, a wave ofwailing words. She' d never seen so much blood, bIue, yellow, red. She never thought a body could contain so much. The words crashing through her head were blood of my blood, jlesh of my jlesh. But this blood wasn't hers, it didn't have anything to do with her. And there were no words, no one, no sound, silence, only blood, blood everywhere, flooding down her legs as she blacked out.

She woke up lying on the floor of the cubicle. Still no one had come into the washrooms. Time seemed to stand still. She was on her own. Using the toilet she slowly pulled herselfup off the bloody floor and sat down to put on her pants and boots. She reached up carefully to pull her shirt and jacket off the hook, and stuffed her bra into her pocket. Too much stretching to get it on. She slipped in the blood as she left the cubicle, but caught the door in time to steady herself. Her heart was beating fast. She wiped the blood off her clothes and hands with wet paper towels at the sink as best as she could. It was a question of getting out ofhere alive and without being noticed. She would not ask for help again. She stuffed the bloody paper towels into the overflowing garbage slot and walked shakily out into the lobby. She could feel the blood on her legs sticking to her jeans. She forced herself to take medium-sized, unrel11arkable steps forward. She nearly tripped on the smallest of four children who were playing loudly on the floor, creating l11Uddy puddles with their snowy boots. The electric doors opened for her and she was carried out into the clean, cold, white air. Is this relief? Is this freedom? She wondered. It's over. 87

Beatrice was waiting for her, standing there in a shiny green raincoat smoking a cigarette. Violet had never been so glad to see anyone. 88

Chapter 9

Feet

The TV was on in the den. Maude sipped her coffee while she worked on her translation, keeping an eye on the ribbon unscrolling along the bottom of the TV screen, in case something terrible happened in the world. The sentences were forming on the page on their own, automatically reversing sentence structures, chopping out unnecessary dross in the

French. 1t was a danger, to do this: was she llleant to reproduce a similar quantity of dross in the English? But she couldn 't bear to, so she mindlessly snipped and pruned as she translated, as her mother used to do in the little flowerbed in front of the house. But her attention was neither on the translation or the TV. She had dug down into the crate and found a relic of Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, which was sitting beside her on the desk. She suddenly pushed her chair back. So what do you think, she asked Mère

Catherine.

"About the world. No, l lllean about Violet."

Mère Catherine said Violet \vas struggling with demons. Catherine was very serious about delllons, and very precise: today, she announced, she was inhabited by

1340fthem.

"Why do they inhabit you?" asked Maude.

"1 agreed to take on the sins of New France, that's why," said Catherine.

"But delllons? Little people with red eyes and pointy ears and an4 0wy tails?"

"Y ou 've never seen thelll?"

"1 thought l saw SOIlle in Place d'y ouville one time, leaping on to someone as soon as he got off the bus." 89

"Yes, there' s lots of them there. And the video lottery arcades. The young

people paint thema11 over their arms and backs. They're the only people in town

who take them seriously, these days."

"Why do the devils pick on them?"

"They're closest to God. They're living out all our sins, poor children."

"No, no," said Maude, shuddering as she thought of Violet being swarmed

by a pack of Iittle demons. "Would you mind taking Violet's away too?"

It seemed to be no small thing. Catherine appeared to be struggling with

something, or talking to someone else. Finally she told Maude to go and see how

her legs were doing in the basement of Hôtel Dieu.

"Legs?" said Maude. "Whose legs?"

"Mine. My legs are down there. l was une soeur hospitalière you know,

that' s where 1 worked."

Mère Catherine becalne quite voluble recaI ling how she used to nurse the

sick at Hôtel Dieu, grinding morsels of Brébeuf' s skull into the tisanes of English

prisoners so that they would convert before they died and thus not go to hell. When

she talked about Père Jean de Brébeufthere was a strange intimacy there, a

familiarity in her tone ofvoice that lnade Maude suspect something, yet Brébeuf had died before Catherine' s time. She' d have to check that out when she knew her better.

"Ma Inère," Maude had said. "1 can't bring you down there with Ine; it's too distracting. Je dois concentrer de toutes mes forces. You 'lI bè there too, - anyway, your legs at least." Catherine seemed okay about that. She didn 't seem to feel too precisely 10cated. 90

The rest of Mère Catherine was in the basement of the Monastère des

Hospitalières, beside Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital the sisters had founded.

As Maude walked down towards the n10nastery, she kept a Iookout for

angels. She didn't normally expect to see angels, but since she'd been carrying

relies around, she' d been surprised to see how l11any were around, and not up to

much of any consequence that she could see. They should surely be more busy

guarding the children. Why weren't they taking better care of Beatrice and Violet ·

now, was it just because they were older? Surely you didn 't lose your guardian

angel wh en you became a teenager! The angels used to be up aIl night, kneeling at

their bedsides; it was they who gave that warm glow in the bedroolns of sleeping

children. Then meeting them outside school to accompany them home on the bus, jostled by aIl the crashing adolescents, the mitts and scarves and hats and shouts,

dodging in and out of the backpacks swinging around Iike hatchets.

At breakfast time Violet used to hold her bowl of cereal up close to her

cheek to offer her guardian angel a spoonful, as ifher angel was sitting on her

shoulder like a parrot. Most of the time they Inust be hungry, reasoned Maude, which is why they congregated in the trees at lnidday in the spring to eat the new shoots. Elms ifthey wanted a high tree, or an old oak. Both have delicious new leaves; Maude used to eat theln on the way down to the vegetable garden in the spring. Young hawthome, of course, was the very best. But what did they do in the winter? Oh eut it out, she told herself. Worrying about whether angels were properly fed in the winter is probably idolatry. What would Honnidas have said?

He'd have diagnosed Scrupulosity perhaps. Something about stepping on a straw that happens to have fal Jen in the shape of a cross. 91

There appeared to be no angels at the car rentaI place, and none at

Macdonalds, although goodness knows they could both do with sorne. She decided to go and have a look at the river before going to the monastery. Perhaps the mighty

St. Lawrence, hinlself roasted on a gridiron, might have sOlnething to offer her in her supplice. He was reported to have said to his torturers, "Tum me over, l'm done on this side." Like Mary Queen of Scots during her beheading, who after a few clumsy blows beseeched the executioner to sharpen his axe. Must be Catherine' s demons make me think this way, she thought. She tumed her head quickly to surprise any that may have decided to roost with her, but there was nothing on her shoulder, she just heard a faint squeak. Then she noticed there were a few young angels playing about on the updrafts beyond the Ramparts. She held onto the rai 1ing on the way down Côte du Palais and stopped for a minute to catch her breath. She looked up at the battlements to see the shape of the sky, and there were sOlne more of them, sitting on the top of the wall above the ruins of the Inunitions factory where her father had worked filling cartridges with gunpowder as a child. Half a dozen scruffy angels combing their hair and picking nits out of each other's wings. She wondered if she could attract their attention and ask theln for help.

"Rey!" she shouted to them. They a11 stopped their toilet at exactly the same tilne, swivelling their heads around to look at her, halos repositioning importantly, and tucked their cOlnbs away into the folds oftheir robes. "Come and help me!" But they were gone, taking off in one continuous blizzard like snow geese at Cap

Tourmente.

Maude watched them as they circled over the shrink-wrapped yachts perched on the banks of the Bassin Louise and rose as one over the towering wall of 92

grain silos. She supposed they had sorne important appointment out towards

Estimauville. A CPR freighter was coming up the river, and a pilot boat buzzed out

to join it before the ship attempted the treacherous narrows below the Cape. Sorne

scruffy Filipino sailors flipped a gantry over the side and Maude saw the river pilot

climb aboard with his briefcase and his smart naval uniform. That's what l need, she

thought. Piloting through these narrows.

As she watched him walk up to the bridge he suddenly reminded her of the

old Reggie, tryingso hard to pilot thema11 ashethoughtamanshould. militarily.

But after the scene with Violet it was as ifReggie had taken offhis uniform and

given up. Violet's willingness to walk out oftheir lives like that Inust have shaken

him to the quick. Ber volcano had tumed the two ofthem into lava, molten and

quivering. He had even stopped Inaking sarcastic remarks about the relics or asking

when she was getting rid of then1. They couldn 't speak about it lTIuch, they didn 't

really share a language. But he' d catch up her hand as she \valked by, and shyly

bring her cups of tea, and smile at her. One day perhaps they' d talk. In the

meantime, the granite-like silence Violet kept in the house iInposed its own rule.

She tumed back up the hill towards the monastery.

Maude' s first in1pression of the Centre Mère Catherine was that the Sisters

took a deep interest in feet. Before she had even opened the inner door she had to

insert her boots into a machine reselTIbling an electric organ pedaI. You poked your

foot into it and pulled a handle and a stiff rotary brush rose up to massage your sole while two lateral brushes came shooting out froln each side and spun around, polishing aJ] the fi]th off your boots before withdrawing again. It was as noisy as an 93

old motorcar. Then once in the lobby, you had to take off your by now spotlessly clean boots or else put little blue gauzey haimets over each one. Maude, thus disinfected and muffled, was led down to the basement by ~ister Mary-Immaculate, who walked silently in front of her in spongey white shoes. Where do they get those shoes anyway, wondered Maude. They reminded her ofHormidas s Sisters, whom he forced to remove their shoes before entering the Tour des Martyrs'because, he shouted, the relics would aIl end up smelling of cheese.

Finally she stood, shod in her blue foot-puffs, on the dazzlingly clean green and white linoleum in front of a large gilt coffin-sized glass-fronted case. A shockingly substantial collection ofbones lay enshrouded in red satin. There was a pelvis, supported in a wire frame so that it was upright, with two folded legs propped in front of it. To give the idea that Mère Catherine had died praying, she guessed. Apart froln a spotlight paid for by the PatrÎlnoine Réligieux, the lighting

\vas flourescent and harshly apostol ic.

"Don 't listen to anything she says," said a tall nun sitting at a new wooden desk in the middle of the room, pointing rudely at Sister Mary-Immaculate. "Elle est folle. Capotée." Maude 100ked froln one to the other, not knowing how to react.

Mary lmlnaculate had said nothing at aIl to her, or had she? SOJnetimes people spoke to Maude and she didn 't notice.

The capotée nun' s face turned red, 1110re angry than ashalned. Perhaps the woman 's emotionallife was spinning dangerously in the intense claustrophobia of community. Maude had seen this among the Precious Blood Sisters. Anyone from the outside was insubstantial, like a lost dream that they couldn 't quite relnember.

The woman turned and shuffled away, the pain in her hips causing them to rock 94

poignantly, the angle ofher buttocks suggesting constipation and loneliness. Does she eat properly? Maude wondered. It' s that institutional food, overcooked, no vitarnins left. She' d a mind to take her home and give her a good plate of vegetables with melted butter, a big bowl of yoghurt with sorne fresh fruit sprinkled with oat bran. And find her a pair of decent-looking shoes.

There were always rows and rows of those same spongey white shoes by the door when she went to take Horrnidas his translations.

He wanted the documents to convince the English-speaking churches right across the country to come and pay homage to his relics. She had to translate endless sycophantic letters to bishops, saying things like Monseigneur) Votre excellence) qui abaisse votre regard généreux et bienveillant sur nos humbles efforts pour le bien du lnoindre de nos brebis) diagnera-t-il bénir à ce petit travail de rien que votre serviteur ... he could never understand that the English version was about a quarter the length of the French, and he' d get suspicious she was cutting out important words.

The sisters had looked at her with poorly disguised loathing, she who was al10wed weekly private meetings with their priest, their founder, their gorgeous, goodlooking, clever, funny, rather short and telnperamental guru with the darting black eyes who when enraged broke into ltalian and begged God' s mercy on all these poor fools WhOll1 he was obliged to chaperone through this transitory life, this yale of tears.

Their weekly sessions were at first purely linguistic. French, of course, being so close to Latin, was the language ofholiness, goodness, truth. English, as everyone knew, was the language of the devil, of Protestants, ofheresy, revolution, 95

materialism, lies and camality. But here he was forced to confront the language to

make headway in the St. Patrick's Parishes of this world. This gave him a sense of

chivalry, of daring and bravado and danger. A crusading knight charging into the

ranks of the enemy. And most astonishingly, he was flirting with the devil through

the person ofMaude, a good Catholic girl, and yet an English speaker! Reading her

devotion as a blessing, he permitted hinlself to be fascinated with the words, with

their origins, their sounds. He repeated the words she used, rolling them delightedly

around on his ton gue like a good wine.

Then he began to get out the good wine, and they rolled that across their

palettes too. Maude was bewitched by his erudition. 1t was an erotic excitement,

she'd never touched minds with someone before, it felt like falling, falling down

and down a deep velvet-lined weIl, studded with gems, a mixture of terror and

beauty. They were falling into each other. But there was nowhere to fa11 , she kept

saying to herself, not really understanding what she nleant. Nowhere to fall except

into heaps of dry leaves.

Their talk drifted into philosophy, into ecclesiology, theology, epistemology,

even into the rudiments of psychiatry, as they were then. He began asking her sorne

rather personal questions, intimate. WeIl, he was a priest after aIl, she thought, that

was okay then. But that's when her defences started to come down, and as each

fence fell , he stepped neatly over it and moved a little closer to push over the next

one. 1t was like watching a house of cards fall , or like being a house of cards falling

- how had it ever managed to stay up for so long? His office was wanll, panelled with deep red oak that reflected back the glow of the lamps. The windows were high and smal1. She frequently only noticed them through tears. A few small 1talian 96

plaster statues of Mary and Joseph, and a Jesus with his bleeding heart pinned to the

outside of his dress reassured her, as she sat there with aIl the cards around her, with

no desire to rebuild her fallen fortress. Only, now she had nothing left, would he

love her? And what would become ofher?

Leaving his office after only an hour, she had to put sorne sort of defence up

around herself again to go home and deal with her mother, her sisters, with the

chores, the noise. She listened to the chickadees in the ironwoods along the road,

she stared at the trout lilies emerging from among the danlp fa]]en leaves. Anything

to shield herself from the unmerciful cold that awaited her at home, the earth-

crusted plough blades leaning up against the door, the dish clatter and grey scummy

water and washboards and the coarse, breaking voices ofher brothers. They teased

her horribly for spending aIl that time with Hormidas. I1's only because we know

English, she kept saying. But her father was dead proud and boasted to a]] the

neighbours that his daughter was an intellectual and that Abbé Hormidas had special

plans for her.

ln the end his' cards began to faU too. He' d COlne back from that last visit to

Rome with a new kind of anxiety, sorne of that glealn of utter confidence had been

extinguished, and that's when they first nlade love. Then he told her what it was

really like in Rome. He told her that they looked down on this little curé from sorne

remote peasant village in the New World. That they called hirn "boy" and that even

sorne of the Canadian Jesuits shamed him in front of the Count, even though they

too were on the scrounge for treasure. Secular treasure though, bits and pieces for

their precious Seminary boys, not like the holy treasure he was bent on saving froln the vultures for his own humble flocks. Those Canadian Jesuits wanted to show the 97

Italians that they weren 't cut from the same cloth as Hormidas.

"1'11 show them," he said to Maude, "once l have a relic of St. Ignatius

they'll be on their knees before me, seeing as they still haven't managed to get their

great hero Jean de Brébeufs skull back yet."

"Back from whonl?"

"From the Augustine sisters. They looked after it aIl the time the lesuits

were banished from Quebec and then refused to give it back. Finally they agreed to,

give back only half of il. So that's what they have. Half a head."

"Y ou people and your bones!" cried Maude. "The Iroquois eat his heart out

then the nuns chop his head in haIf! And now you're buying up his bones!"

AlI he ever saw were bones, Hormidas. He relished every bony protuberance

on her body. It was as if his eyes rejected the flesh, disdained the carnality of her

and x-rayed straight through to her bones. "Ah, those clavicIes!" hemoaned in

p]easure. And now he'd sent her a crate ofthem, while the flesh still clung to her

own.

"But you're a priest! What about your vow of celibacy!" she'd say, when

their 10ve-l11aking was over. And what about me, l'm guilty of fornication! But it was as if he couldn 't hear her.

"How could anything that feels so good be bad?" he said once. A man of such theological nuance and sophistication reduced to the reasoning of a child. She looked up at the crucifix above his desk, the bobbles ofbIood clotted on the

Saviour's hands and feet. Hormidas would have to start again, a brand new theology that took account of the one power he' d not fully accounted for.

One day, as she picked up her skirt offhis desk and he poured himself a 98

glass of sherry, she dared ask, "What ifl have a baby? What Inust God think ofus!"

"We know what St. Paul thinks," he said, ignoring the first question as if it were not his domain, "but do we know what God thinks? Maude my child, you have no idea how much 1 needed this. This is no ordinary situation. My very bones cry out for yours."

The needs of Horrnidas' s bones never seelned quite enough of a reason.

What ifher parents should find out! What if anyone should find out! What if she got pregnant! She'd be kept in the barn and the child would be put in an institution and she' d become someone' s servant somewhere. The worst thing was keeping the secret. If it was in fact okay, why couldn 't she tell anyone? But she knew that was impossible. She Ionged to tell her friends when they boasted about their encounters with boys at parties or at church. She envied their innocence, as if from the distance of another era. She envied their humble expectations, and how earnestly they dissected the Ineaning of every word or look that had been exchanged. It was aU in the song her lnother used to sing.

1 went to church on Sunday My love he passed n1e by 1 knew her mind was changing By the roving of her eye.

My love is fair and proper Her waist is neat and slnall And she is quite goodlooking And that 's the best of ail. 99

But she could never be like them, the other girls, again. So what hope was there for her daughter, her daughter in whom she had demanded a respect for the church, for the priests, for the liturgy. There was no more innocence.

Maude stood in front of the glass case containing Catherine's pelvis and tibia. It was probably Catherine who had refused to give back that skull of

Brébeuf s, and she could understand that. On the glass of the cabinet she saw a reflection ofherself superimposed on Catherine's bones, as if it were an x-ray ofher own body, as if Catherine and she were one.

She could see Hormidas now on a Sunday morning in Precious Blood, standing in the pulpit. The stained glass window of the Ascension behind him converting the hard cold light of the Laurentians into rich reds and blues that fell like jewels on his neck and shoulders as he spoke. His great chest was pumping and grinding away there in the pulpit, booming out ail that delicious rubbish. On a

Sunday moming he spoke in a language that she found confusedly and unbearably erotic after a Saturday aftemoon with that wanTI neck against her own chest and that growl of pleasure next to her ear. And then 1ater she couldn 't tolerate hearing his religious language anylTIOre. And the Word was made Flesh. She had to translate it, find other words, otherwise he would have stolen God fr01TI her, and that she would never have been able to forgive.

"What are you looking for?" said a voice behind her. A ta11 W01TIan in spongey white shoes with .enormous bruise-coloured bags under her eyes was standing beside her eating a peach.

"1 was wondering what to do about my daughter," said Maude. "She doesn ' t seem to have any respect for her body. She gives it to anyone who cornes along." 100

"Anyone at aIl?" said the nun, as if she suspected Maude was being

unreasonable.

"Weil, l don 't know, but l think so. She never tells me anything. She just

stays out aIl night and carries a package of condoms around in her pockets. And is

probably doing drugs too. What did l do wrong?"

There was a silence as Maude took stock of the fact tha~ she had finally said

what was on her mind, to a human.

"What did you do wrong?" said the nun back to her kindly. Maude frowned.

Of course it had something to do with Hormidas, but had she done anything wrong?

It felt like a burden she had carried, and that now she was being asked to put it

down. Rest her weary bones. Just rest, and wait, and trust. Trust in God's voice.

Why couldn 't one simply go to church to be sure to hear it? Would that be so l11uch

to ask? But it seemed it had to be new every time. Today it was a kind nun,

tomorrow it rnight be an overheard conversation on the bus, or a sudden glimpse of

sky through buildings.

One warm summer evening after a session at the Presbytère, she' d arrived

home to find her sister Carmen waiting for her at the door. She was wearing a worn

out cotton dress with tiny roses on it and carrying a brool11 , but when she saw

Maude she put it aside and leaned against the doorpost, smiling secretiveJy.

"What were you doing?" she said, eyes glittering. "Y ou 're late. And you

look funny." Sorne of the younger boys had gathered around.

"Nothing. The sisters kept me late." But Carmen had looked into her eyes and seen something there that Maude usually managed to hide. 101

"Y ou 're in love, aren 't you," she said. "With that priest. Are you doing it

with hün?"

"No, of course not! Leave me alone!" lt couldn 't be. With Cannen knowing

it really couldn 't be. It had to stop. She dropped her bag and ran.

"Where are you going? Stop! Maude! Come back! l didn't mean it! "

She ran. She wanted to run back to Abbé Honnidas but it was out of the

question. So she ran down to the river, to the rock pools that she had always loved

as a child, a relnelnbrance of freedom. It was low tide, and she ran down the

battures that stretched out naked to the far grey water tossing beyond.

She always told her younger sisters they were dragons' backs, those jagged

red crests of folded rock snaking down the shore. Her heart slowed and she gulped

the salt air. Her boots crashed through pools of light, exploding theln. Tiny fish

swam before her in a frenzy, and she herded them capriciously froln pool to pool.

She was reckless with the danger of it: the tide would suddenly tum and she'd be

trapped. It was dusk and no-one would have seen her there.

She stood on the crumbling mounds of shale for a moment, realizing that she

could never share this with hinl, never walk publicly with him along the shore.

]fhe could see me out here, now, she thought, instead of always in the

office, surrounded by papers and suffocating in the dense and urgent sme]] of floor

wax and fumiture polish, he would know me, who] real1y am. She walked from rock to rock, stooped to feel the warmth of the water and then saw herself stooping, as if from afar. Who was she stooping for? Was it for herself or for hÎ1n?

But she had finally convinced herself that this patient Onlooker didn't exist, the one who might have fallen in love if he'd seen her stoopin ~ . She longed to go 102

back to being a child who stoops to examine a snail or to pick up a rock with a hole

in it through which you could look right across the river to Lévis, with no thought of

Hormidas. He might be strolling on the bluff, lnight happen to see her walk down to

the tidal fiats, might watch her tirelessly for an hour and suddenly, no longer able to

resist, plough down the slope through the dog roses and the wild phlox to meet her.

Of course, she told herself, he is far too busy with his own life to watch someone

stooping on the tidal fiats. And this seemed to be a new and dangerous temptation,

to care more about how a man might see you than about how you really thought

about that man.

She pushed through the long salt-grass; it tickled her thighs, and lying across

it here and there were trails of wet seaweed left by the retreating tide, smooth and

dark and greasy like a snail's path. They smelt ofrotting sea, and she fought her

disgust. They lay so lightly across the tops of the grasses, the goldenrod and the

fieabane.

Do you still have a plan for nle? she asked God. Other than to abandon nle

to shameful, secret, forbidden, impossible love? She saw her life going on into old

age, her secret never told, her love never celebrated, her body never giving birth. Oh

happy race ofwomen who bear their young and ti11 the earth and lie beneath. Her

ovaries would shrivel up with an audible crackle, an old witch breathing dry curses

into her wOlnb. She heard the voices of other women's husbands saying, "Don't tell her, she'll be jealous." Or her mother's voice, saying as she did of other WOl11en,

"It's so sad, she never had any children." There was never anything more to say about such a WOl11an. lt was her whole definition. And over the years, she would acquire l110re and more godchildren, the consolation prize of the infertile. 103

One day, she stopped dead at the sound of a stream that fell down off the hillside. A stream she knew well, but she' d never before noticed how proud and clear it was as it flowed, glittering and expansive, across the marshy flat into the St.

Lawrence. The path of the ducks across the little estuary left a trail of broken waves and silk circles. l do exist, l did see you, l am closer than the bluffs, nearer than the eye, the 1. Even if you hadn't stooped, l would have loved you. Nathaniel, l saw you under the fig tree. Passion of Christ, strengthen me. Oh good Jesus, hear me. In thy wounds, hide me.

The path along between the cliff and the flats was bare stones, and a haze of crickets blustered before her in clunlsy procession. Sorne touched her: one went into her boot, sorne landed in her hair, and the talking kittiwakes and the crying killdeers were aIl saying th~ same thing, and the wind was promising rain, so tonight she would hear the wind and the rain on her window and it would be okay agaln.

Violet was now under that fig tree; he was nearer than the eye to her too.

"!t'II be ail right, it will," she said to the nun. It had been and it was okay, and aIl would be well again. "Now l have to go."

Carnlen was looped and braided in amongst her memories, like a jarring colour, and Maude knew now that she lnust get on the bus and go and see Carmen at the hospital. She' d never really gone back to Carmen, after she' d run away that day.

She protected Cannen from scandaI by taking a distance from her. It was Maude herself who had been the proverbial lnillstone, a living millstone who' d carried poor

Cannen to the bottom of the river. Nowadays Maude fed Cannen' s children, talked 104

to her when she came up for air, but when Carmen was out of sight, well, Maude had been deliberately forgetful. 105

Chapter 10

Sweat

Violet worked at the university in the Pollack cafeteria. It was located in one of

dozens of nearly-identical large square concrete buildings that made up the bleak,

windswept campus. Violet asked herself repeatedly how a university could be so

ugly in such an apparently deliberate way, and had come to the conclusion that it

had perhaps looked smart on an architect's drawing board in about 1960.

Today her boss, a large woman with a Beauce accent, told Violet that she

had to clean the chicken barbecue machine or the inspector would get thema11 in

trouble. She pointed to a huge glass booth in which two hundred chickens could be

roasted at once. It had not been cleaned in two months.

No one offered her rubber gloves. The boss thrust into her anns a bucket full

ofvarious bottles with names like Lux-o-cleen and Deteroll, a sn1all square sponge

and a ball ofwire wool. She said nothing, clearly expecting Violet to know exactly

what to do. As Violet elnptied the bottles into the bucket, noxious fumes choked

her, tears came to her eyes and she gagged. She looked around. No one had seen.

She added a jet of water and hesitantly started on the worst sections, the barbecuing

rods, with the wire wool. She had to practical1y get into the glass booth to reach the

furthest rods, her arms rubbing up against its greasy sides. She scrubbed harder and harder and still the hard ridges of burnt chicken fat clung fast to the rods. The fat seemed to have bumed right into the metal. The wire wool bit into her hands. She wondered if a metal spatula or a knife lnight have done a better job. 106

Soon her thoughts turned to natural disasters, hand grenades and dynamite.

She imagined the whole kitchen sucked into the air like a typhoon, the workers in

their blue nylon dresses spiralling around slowly amongst the steaming pans, and a

ring of students standing on the ground looking into the air, only mildly interested.

She mentally lobbed a grenade into their midst.

The bleaches and detergents bumed into her hands and her fingers were

tuming into pale puffy sausages, mortally ugly to behold.

She dynamited the entire university.

As she twisted and sweated and scrubbed, a parade of women passed by in

unifonl1s identical to hers, not slowing their pace or looking at her but flinging

"C 'est pas un cadeau, hein!" in her direction. They called her l'Irlandaise ,because

they heard her speaking English on her cell. The women were old and smeJt of meat

that had sat around for too long. How many ofthem had had abortions, how Il1any

had been happy to find they were pregnant? How many had lost their one true love?

How many didn 't believe in love any Il10re? Violet saw older women in a new light, now. She felt an undertow in their wake, as though if she didn 't watch out, she' d be dragged into their COll1pany, sucked into a tide of jaded wOJnanhood, WOll1en thrown up on the stone beach once too often. They wore their defeat with fortitude, she decided. They a11 had red hair, dyed and penl1ed and neatly netted.

lt took Violet four hours to c]ean the chicken barbecue machine. When she finished, her entire upper body was caked with grease and she was trell1bling with fatigue. To her horror there were big round sweat marks under her arms, just like the other women. And then it was time to serve lunch out front. 107

Being "out front" lTIeant being trapped between the high glass-fronted

counters in front of her with the pans belching steam into her face, and the stainless

steel heated cupboards behind her. She loaded the plates with heaps of mushy green

beans, mashed potatoes and leathery slabs of meat, slopping a spoonful of thin,

lumpy gravy over the top. She tried to hide the gaping sweat marks under her arms

as she put the plates on the counters for the students, but the counters were too high,

there was no way they wouldn 't see. It made her want to weep for shame. Her face,

too, no doubt, was dripping in sweat and steam, red and glistening. Hideous.

The students talked and laughed loudly amongst themselves. The men didn 't

give her a second glance. From the cupboards behind her, she hauled out heavy tub

after heavy tub of slop to replace the empty ones, sometimes coming face to face

through the cupboard wüh one of the cooks fron1 the kitchen behind throwing full

tubs on the shelves with irritating ease. Then she' d catch a glimpse of her barbecue

machine behind them, transformed and transparent. She might have feH a tinge of

pride if it wasn 't already loaded up with dozens more chickens spraying their filthy

grease into the universe. She grabbed the replenished tubs and tumed away,

dropping then1 into the boiling stean1 pans in front ofher.

Another younger woman, Maria, worked beside her. She was fat and

cOlTIfortable and didn 't SeelTI to nlind living with ever-expanding circles of dried and

renewed sweat under her arms, like tree rings, nor did she notice that she stank of

old sweat. Maria tried to be friendly to Violet about once a day. Today she commiserated about the chicken barbecue machine.

"They always make the new ones do it. 1 had to do it too. I1's hel1 , isn 't it?"

But Violet just shrugged. Hadn 't they invented deodorant, where she came fr01TI ? 108

She wanted nothing to do with SOll1eone with annpits like that. When Violet tumed

away from her, Maria took no offence, and instead chatted familiarly with the male

students, behaving for a11 the world as if she was something to look at. With the

older women she behaved exactly like one ofthem, gossiping about the boss and

complaining about her 'husband' s laziness. There was a freedom of word and

gesture in Maria that Violet was tempted to envy. She hardened her heart fiercely

against it. There would be nothing left if she let herself go like that.

She longed for the cigarette break outside in the corridor, away from

happy, friendly Maria and the heat.

Finally she was able to take a ten-minute break. The sight ofherself in the

bathroom mirror confirmed a11 her worst fears, but she had no time to deal with it if

she was also going to snloke. She got out into the corridor as soon as she could, and

leaned her forehead against the cool white tiles of the wall, relishing the bitter Sl11ell

of the cold air rising from the con crete floor. Her fingers trembled as she lit a

cigarette. Her fingernails stung and her hands hadn 't 100ked that bad since she was a

kid and had played too long in the bath. She drew the smoke into her lungs, her first

deep breath aIl day.

But soon it was time to clean the tables again, and fill hundreds of sugar jars and empty hundreds of dirty ashtrays. The lumps of gum stuck to the bOttOJll looked like tiny hardened brains. She 1110ved slowly, as Maria had advised her to do, with her wet rag and her big black garbage bag. The shouting voices were distant now, the crashing of stainless steel tubs and the roar of cascading cutlery. Every time she emptied an ashtray, little puffs of ash floated out of the bag and hung in the bealTIS 109

of sunlight slanting down through the windows. She stopped to watch them. She

was alone and could take her time. Still, she'd set fire to the place one day ...

Sometimes the woman from the.Beauce caIne downstairs to watch her filling

her sugar jars and wiping the wet ash out of each ashtray. She would jut her big chin

forward and fold her arms appraisingly. It was unnerving. She wore a dark blue

uniform that made her look like a policeman. Once she had touched Violet's buttock

in a way that didn't seem quite accidentaI. Sometimes she didn't stop to watch but

just put her big cakey head around the door and shouted at Violet to hurry up,

throwing a few empty cardboard boxes around for good measure. Her voice echoed

harshly in the empty cafeteria and Violet waited for it to die away before she carried

on.

At the end ofher shift, Violet was so faint she could barely take offher

hairnet and plastic apron, unzip her pale blue nylon dress and peel off her sticky

stockings. The feeling of getting her jeans back on, the new make-up around her

eyes and the satisfying click of her card in the tÎlne-clock revived her somewhat.

What was tiring, more than anything, was to feel so ugly, in that nylon pale blue

zip-up dress, knowing your face was shining with grease and sweat. And the

armpits. And then there was the haimet, for the love of God.

And now here was Maria with her face too close and her sweet sweaty

smile, asking how her day had been.

"Same as yesterday," said Violet. "Tiring.'"

"You look pale, deary. You been il1?" said Maria.

Violet looked at her in terror, as ifshe'd guessed her secret. "It's hard to work in thisjob ifyou're ill," Maria went on without needing an answer. "l'm not 110

we11 either but l can 't afford not to come. My husband says to me, he says, just take

a day off Maria, but l can't, l says, l can't, where wil1 the groceries come from? He

thinks that just because he was an engineer in our country, that the food will just

appear on the table, that someone owes him a living. But he won 't take a job

because he's too proud. He thinks ifhe can 't be an engineer, it is too poor a job.

Dishwashing in Ashton 's, they are hiring eight people! But no, he says. l am an

engineer. l say, they won 't let you be an engineer in this country unless you go back

to school and start again! Then he gets angry with Ine and says l am trying to nlake

him feel bad. So l take this job just so we can pay the rent, and he tells me to take a

dayoff!"

"What's your illness?" said Violet in spite ofherself. It worried her that

Maria was taking her into her confidence, as ifthey were in the same boat. And now

here she was asking this dangerous question.

"Not really illness, dear. Just a miscarriage. It's nothing."

And unexpectedly, Maria burst into tears. Violet looked down. Her teInples were pounding and she blushed. "It was my first baby," said Maria, taking in a big breath and giving a single loud sob, more like a snort. She quickly dried her eyes on the heIn of her dress and gathered her shoulders fiercely together, as if to hang herself more solidly on her frame.

"'} 'm sorry,"mulnbled Violet, but it sounded Inore like a confession than cOlnpassion, as though she was the one who had causedMaria's miscarriage.

"But we a11 lose children," said Maria. "My mother lost children, my grandlnother, your Inother ... so many dead children." She stood there meditating as if aJone, arms by her sides, head slightly hanging forward, in the con crete baselnent 111

of Pollack by the time-clock. There was no protection for this woman against the

violence of the flesh. She was undefended. "How many women have not lost a

child, SOIlle time in their lives?" she continued, looking sudden1y at Violet, her eyes

red and innocent. "We are all grieving our dead children. You are young still. You

will have children, you will maybe lose sorne. 1 hope someone wil1 be there when

you cry for your child, too. Thank you." She looked away. Violet saw that she was

dislllissed. Maria took a deep breath, reframing herself again, and went back to

work.

She asked for so very little, thought Violet, but she did ask, and she asked

me. It was a simple need, just for someone to hear her. As if she had asked for a

1ight, or a glass of water.

As Violet left the building she stopped for a moment and just stood in the

blissful shock of the cold air, her body' s deep fatigue almost sensuous now that

work was over, the battle done for another day. Then she caught sight of Tom,

waiting for her by a spindly tree around which the wind had carved out a bleak

hollow in the snow. His thin grey pants were bil10wing around his little legs like

lowered sai Is .

"What are you doing here?" she exc1ainled. "How did you get here?" Tom didn 't reply right away. He just put his cold hand into hers. TOIll looked away.

"How long have you been waiting? Where's your mum? Where's Beatrice?"

"Mum's in hospital. Don't know where Beatrice is. Sorne guy came to the house looking for MUIll and 1 said 1 would go and find her. He said he' d wait for her. 1 didn 't like him. So 1 had to leave to pretend to go and find her."

"What about Illy lllUIll?" 112

"1 went to your house. Your mum said you were at work."

"1 see. So you want me to go and talk to the guy?"

"No. l want to see my mum." Tom's voice was strong.

"Tom, you know she doesn't want you visiting her in the hospital."

"1 don 't care. l want to see her. '.' His voice broke into a scream. "1'11 go on

my own ifyou don 't come with me."

Violet looked at Tom. Why should he deal with this stuff? He "vas too

young. But he was so brave. Braver than anyone. He was taking his life into his

hands, and putting his hand into her hand to do it.

Cars were roaring up and down, along Quatre-Bourgeois, along Ste Foy, into

the Metro parking lot, into the Tim Hortons parking lot. A bus squealed to a haIt

right in front oftheln, and they jumped back to avoid the spray of slush. The bus

driver opened the door and looked at Violet and Tom with raised eyebrows. She

shook her head, he shut the doors and moved off into the evening. In the revv-revv

drone of the accelerating bus and the cloud of diesel fulnes she grasped Tom's hand

more firmly. She looked out across the pyralnid north of the Ste-Foy Road to the

Jesuit College below, its elm trees graceful in their nakedness, and then beyond to

the mountains, yellow and purple in the evening sunlight.

Why shouldn't TOln see Carmen? Perhaps Violet would finally deliver him

into her hands, instead of always taking over. But then perhaps Tom real1y would be traumatized. But surely not more traumatized than by having to open the door to dealers when he's home alone. Perhaps it would shake Carmen into facing the truth.

But she might run into Yannick at the hospital. Yannick, whom shehadn't seen since before the abortion, who didn ' t ev en know about it. Why shouldn 't she see 113

Yannick, too? Why shouldn 't she tell him? Like Maria just told her. Except she

wouldn't use the word chi/do Simply saying it, then tuming away. No story, no

demands on the emotions. Just the truth. They would both go, fearlessly, straight

into the mouth of the dragon.

"Okay," she said. "Let's go. He~e's the 7."

"Then we change to the 800 at Youville," said Tom, leaping at her side like

a foal on new grass.

They sat down on a backward-facing seat. The windows were so streaked

with slush, salt and lTIud that they couldn 't see out at aIl. The man opposite them sat

with his legs apart and looked around at the other passengers with frank

condescension, stroking his grey moustache with stubby fingers. He looked at her

and Tom appraisingly. She wiped her nose on her mittens and looked at herself in

the dirty black windows, pursing her lips at her absurd fluffy purple hat that, in a

better mood, she had thought 100ked cool. What would Yannick think? She'd have

Tonl with her, so it would be okay, Yannick couldn't say too much. Anyway she

didn 't care a fuck what Yannick thought. What she really wanted was to forget

about everything. When aIl this was done she'd go see Beatrice, tel] sorne wicked stories about her and Yannick and have a good laugh. 114

Chapter Il

Wings

Violet and Tom leaned into the wind on rue Estimauville, tacking across the vast

parking lot towards the hospital where Carmen was staying. Tom always heard it as

Hostie Maudite Ville, the Cursed Town. He ran to keep up with her, spitting salty

grit out of his mouth. His ears were buming with the cold and the noise in them was

so loud it hurt. His mother might tell hinl something like, how ridiculous, to wear

your cap in this kind ofweather. He looked forward to this, it would be like what

real mothers say. It would be a sign she was better.

People loped in and out of Tim Hortons, the only enterprise still in business in

the whole dreary plaza. Sorne ofthenl limped. Tom followed Violet to\vards a

building on the hill, a massive gray stone institution like a prison, with hundreds of

barred windows glinting dully in the evening light.

How will we ever find her in there? TOI11 thought. He lingered to stare up at the great white statue of St. Michael the Archangel wielding a long pikestaff and wrestling with a serpent. So that's what he looked like, the chief angel. Aunt Maude had told Tom to talk to St. Michael about his I11other; the hospital used to be named after hi111, she said. And here was St. Michael himself, in the tlesh, or in the bone, spearing the serpent in the chest, the serpent that took his 1110ther away. He sometimes found bits of paraphemalia around the house, syringes, plastic bags with a teeny bit ofwhite powder in thel11, like old dried snakeskins. He hid them. That big serpent was sure]y a ratt]esnake, because when his mother was going off the 115

rails again, he could almost hear the rattle. The rattle of a train, or a snake faI1ing off

a train, or a wagon faI1ing off the rails, or a snake falling off the wagon.

"Dubba-dubba dubba-dubba dubba-dubba," he chanted to Saint Michael.

"Get hi m, whup that snake real good."

"What?" said Violet as she dragged Tom on up the steps. She puI1ed her

black hood almost right over her face and spoke to two men who were starting to

put up a plastic winter porch. To stop the mad people blowing away before they got

in the front door, thought Tom.

"Come ON, Tom, hurry up can't you?"

"1 s my JllUm okay?"

"Oh she's fine, no - it's l'm afraid ... "

1t was hard to get any answers out of Violet these days. She'd only just

staJied speaking again. Perhaps she just kept forgetting to finish her sentences

because she' d got out of the habit. But if she was afraid, he should be too.

"Are the Jl1ad people dangerous?" he whispered through windchapped lips.

"No," said Violet. "At least, l don't know. Your Uncle Mathurin was here aIl his ~ife. He wasn 't dangerous. He said there were 5000 people living here. They couldn't all be that dangerous, or they'd have formed an army and gone offto kill the town of Beauport."

"Why are there bars on the windows then?"

"That' s for the ones who want ta run away. Or jUll1p out."

lump out. Thank God the bars were there to stop his mother jumping out.

She might land on the spear and hurt herself.

"Did he eventually kill the serpent, St. Michael?" 116

"What serpent? What?"

"N othing."

In the entranceway there were no mad people to be seen. Sorne smart

women in brightly ~oloured scarves and long black woollen coats, his mother called

them snivel-servant coats, were cOl11ing out of an auditorium carrying steaming

dishes. A notice-board propped outside said "Thai Cooking Course." A man in

another black woollen coat was talking on his cellphone in qne hand and balancing

a plate of coconut rissoles in the other.

"Are they mad?" asked Tom discreetly.

"Probably," said Violet. They approached the reception desk, where a

WOl11an with a headset telephone was talking in strange interrupted sentences,

yapping like Mrs Gravel's dog. She prodded at lit red buttons with her short fingers,

wom to stubs from so l11uch stabbing, and snapped into the 1110uthpiece in between.

That woman might be able to handle a serpent, thought T0111, and not bother with a

spear. As she lunged from button to button she glanced up briefly at the cream

ceiling panels, but never at Violet and Tom. Finally she looked at thel11, her eyelashes loaded and menacing with mascara.

"Yannick Boulé."

"Basenlent two, wing H, go to the end."

"Has anyone else been to visit him, earlier today?"

The woman looked at Violet for the first tinle, lingering on the naked strip at her midriff.

"That's confidential," she said, casting her cru sty eyes upwards to check the ceiling panels were still in place. "The elevator is to your left." 117

"What about Mum," said Tom, his eyes filling with tears. "1 want to see

Mum."

"Canllen Lablanchet," said Violet.

"Basement two, wing H, gallery 8, rOOI11 02788."

They made their way down to the basel11 ent and started out along an endless pale green corridor. There were yellow roadmarkings on the floor, and stop signs at the corners. They were nearly run over by an electric golf-cart pulling a trailer. A wrinkled man in a blue uniform had stopped his golfcart at the Loto-Quebec booth at the corner oftwo tunnels to buy a 649 ticket.

Twenty minutes later they were in a big open area with windows and a plastic Christmas tree in the corner, even though it wasn 't yet Christmas. Hung from the ceiling with thread were huge paper snowflakes, dancing crazily because of a loud whirring l11achine in the corner that s~cked out smoke.

And here, at last, were SOll1e people, sitting at tables, all of them smoking.

But the people didn 't look Illad, they just looked sad, or nervous, or poor. They weren 't speaking to each other. Even Violet stopped in her tracks. Doors off the central area bore handpainted wooden signs that said CINEMA,

WOODWORKING, and FASHION.

"Where are we?" said TOIll , putting his hand tentatively into Violet's.

"It' s a fake underground mali for l11ad people," she said. A fake Casse-

Croute in an alcove was offering day-old doughnuts, and a man in a fringed leather jacket and cowboy hat bought a whole tray and slunk off, folding his body over it

Iike a shrimp.

"Where are the 111ad people?" asked Tom. 118

"Here they are," she said, "they're right here."

What if they talk English? he thought. The mad people might not like being

ca11ed mad. His mother often made comments about people in fast English on the

bus or in the street, assunling no-one understood, and it worried Tom. More people

spoke fast English than she thought.

What did it mean to be mad? Did these people a11 have rattlesnakes COIne

and get them sometimes, like his mother? Perhaps it's just when they speak they're

mad, he thought, and that's why they weren't speaking. The snake could come any

time, and then he'd be caught too, and have to stay. But it didn't seem so bad -

there were doughnuts.

"Do you know where Yannick is?" said Violet to the woman at the Casse-

croute.

"ln the store," she said, pointing through the doorway that said F ASHION.

Violet and Tom peeked through the slit of a window into the store and sure enough

there he was, among the racks and racks of dressing-gowns and shelves of pink,

blue and brown fluffy slippers. He seemed to be encouraging a very thin woman to take off the clothes she was wearing. She had put on four dressing-gowns at once

and was trying to leave the store. He turned her around delicately and pointed her back into the changing rOOIn. Violet turned bright red.

Tom's heart began thunlping. What would his Inother say to him? Where was she? Did she have bars on her windows? What would she look like, now that she was in the Inadhouse? He was even more frightened of perhaps meeting

Beatrice here. It was Beatrice who didn 't ever want hinl coming here. Perhaps she knew that mad people attacked young boys, and it was dangerous for him. 119

"Voyons," he said.

"C'est nlon petit cousin," said Violet.

"Okay. Okay, je sais," he said, Iooking away. Then he seemed to recol1ect

hinlself. "Ben, tu veux-tu un café?" he asked her. "Toi," he said turning to TOITI,

"que veux-tu? Un coke? Asseyez-vous." He went to the fake Casse-Croute and bought thelTI drinks.

"When are we going to see Mum though?" asked TOITI as soon as Yannick was out of earshot.

"Later, in a lTIinute." 120

"C'est ta première fois icitte?" Yannick asked Tom politely as he sat down

with the drinks. He began to explain to thenl about the building, all with numbers,

and as if it were his own house he was talking about.

"We have 43,338 square metres of roof," he said, "250 fridges, 72

dishwashers and 125 kilometres of internaI pipes." Violet was staring at him, as if

she was having sorne other c-onversation with him in her mind. "We have 6500

windows," he continued, "and 190,570 square metres of floor, and 800 toilets."

"No," she said, beginning to laugh. "Not 800 toilets. That's a whole lot of

crap."

"Y es," said Yannick. "And every year we buy 34,248 kilos of carrots and

] 8,850 kilos ofpork. That' s about 620 pigs per year!" His voice was rising, like

when you speed up a DVD. "Our cooks cook 5,426 meals a day, and in the laundry

they wash 2,245 tonnes oflaundry a day!"

"Look," said TOI11 with alarm, "here conles a l11an with a knife!"

The l11an was striding down the yellow corridor, a cowl oflinlp sweaty hair

swinging over his round red face. He was heading straight for their table.

Violet grabbed Tom's hand and dashed behind the plastic spruce tree. The green glittery polystyrene balls stuck to her hair, and everyone sitting at the tables was staring at thel11. Yannick stood up slowly, his arnlS by his si des, looking pained and ready.

A man in a baseball cap and l11ackinaw got up frol11 his table and came over to stand just a little distance away from the spruce tree, laughing gently at Tom and

Violet. "Shhh - "hissed T0111. "We're playing agame!" 121

But the man with the dagger had seen them and was coming after Violet.

Perhaps he's a like a bad dog, thought Tom, ifyou run away, he thinks ofyou as

prey and runs after you. Then the man grabbed Violet's hand and pulled her out

from behind the tree. Before she'd had a chance to struggle Tom grabbed a plastic

ornament frOlTI the tree, a httle church with a red snowy roof, and dug the steeple

into the back of his leg. The man let let out a great horsy yell, at which everyone in

the café stood up except the man in the wheelchair. The woman in the Casse-croûte

came running out and grabbed Tom.

"1 saw you do that you little vermin," she shrieked, spilling timbits all over

the floor. A few people canle over and began to pick them up and eat them. A

woman who had been speaking into a payphone ever since they arrived came

towards them with a broom. TOI11 tlinched, waiting to be hit, but she had just come

to sweep the sugary lTIeSS off the floor.

"David!" said Yannick, not loudly, calmly. "What are you doing?"

"Don't even talk to her," snar]ed David. He still had her hand in his, but she

was trying to pull it away. ''l'm going to kill her." Why wasn't Yannick's face afraid or surprised or angry? TOI11 thought as he twisted to try and escape fronl the hand holding his ear. Yannick's face justlooked curiously tired.

"David, l told you, it's okay. We prolnised. Remel11ber? It's okay. Do you remember what Mum said?"

The woman at the Casse-Croute was by now leaning contentedly against her counter, her Inassive chest festooned with icing sugar. She had forgotten that one hand still held on to Tom's ear. With the other she had made a quick call to Security and was now relaxed and enjoying the scene. 122

"Just like on the TV, like on les Virginiens," she said absently to Tom. Tom

had seen the episode too, where the girl was being held hostage. The next part was

that the man called David would put the knife to her throat.

The people at the tables were now standing around in a senli-circle with

doughy knees, licking the sugar off their lips, eager for what came next. The woman

with the broom was c]eaning up around David's feet and asked him to lift one foot

and then the other, which he obediently did. Yannick lnoved towards Violet.

"Don 't go near him, he's got a knife! " shouted the Casse-Croûte woman in

spite ofherself. David put the rusty dagger against Violet's throat. "Come near her

and she's dead," he said to Yannick, who stopped in his tracks.

"You 're a complete lunatic!" said one of the people frO]l1 the tables

thoughtfully. He tumed to the others. "What shaH we do to save the Gothic

Princess?" They muttered amongst themselves and the ]l1an in the wheelchair said

loudly he couldn 't help out because he was on medication. They all sat down again.

Tom had been sizing up the room as he struggled quietly against the hand at

the end of the fat sugary aml. David had her by the hair now, and her head was

pulled back. She was silent and her face was even whiter than she liked it. David put

the knife against her face and pul1ed it down, and suddenly there was a red line

down her cheek.

Violet was not going to die. TOI11 had to make sure of that. Suddenly he

broke free frol11 the Casse-Croûte WOlllan. It was as if SOI11eone had placed a spear

. in his hand.

* * * 123

When Carmen opened the door of the rOOI11 she tlinched to see her sister.

"Is everyone okay?" she cried. "Is it Tom? 1s he okay?"

"He's fine," said Maude. "Everyone's okay."

This was the Carmen she never wanted to see: her face contorted in anxiety and pain, her hair not up in its usual neat ponytail but radiating around her head in alarming bristles. She wore a long loose batik dress. Very unlike Carmen.

Carnlen stood at the do or waiting for an explanation.

"1 like your dress," said Maude. She couldn 't think of anything else to say.

"Y ou would, you were the one who gave it to me," said Carmen."1 loathe it, but it's the only thing l can wear in here." She continued standing by the door as if the apparition ofher sister would soon fade, and she could shut it again and go back to bed. She fiddled with the door handle and swayed back and forth from leg to leg.

"Why is that?" Maude made herself say. Carmen hesitated a few seconds, in shock. Maude had not only never visited her in hospital, but had never asked her anything about her drug problem.

"Y ou don 't want to know."

"Yes, l do," said Maude.

"Everything else hurts when it touches 1lle," Carmen said slowly, watching

Maude with suspicion, as if she had been sent as a spy by the doctor. "Plus l have to pee every few minutes." She waited for Maude to interrupt and change the subject, but she didn '1. 124

"Because of the drugs," she went on cautiously, "sometimes l don 't make it

in time, even in this thing." They were still standing at the open door. Carmen was

leaning more and more heavily on the door-handle.

"Why do you have to pee aIl the time?" Maude forced herself to ask. But it

was getting easier. The truth will set you free - perhaps there would be a new

freedom at the end of all this.

"It's aIl to do with getting detoxed. Legs as weIl. The legs are agony. Most

of the time 1 lie in the shower and cry. And the diarrhoea," she said, turning away

and pitching herself back towards the bed. "God, it's hell, Iiterally."

"Literally," said Maude, nodding. "But you're on your way out now."

"Don't give me the positive crap," said Carmen. "1'11 be positive when l'm

ready to be. l gotta pee now."

She went offto the bathroorn. Maude walked into the room and sat down on the end of Carmen 's bed. The bedspread was pale green. The wal1s were blue-green and the blinds were pale blue. A green hospital gown hung on the back of the door, and the linoleuln was green and white.What is it with greeny-blue and hospitals? she thought. Why not pink? Or black? The roorn was quiet except for a bluebottle.

Carmen caIne back and sat down on a chair by the bed. They sat for sorne tirne saying nothing until Cannen started swinging at the bluebottle furiously with her pillow.

"Shut UP!" she yelled.

"l'Il open the window," said Maude.

"Nothing can get out those windows," said Cannen, "not even a fly." ~------~

125

Maude looked up at the -high window openings, out of reach of the patients.

Two angels were clambering through them, lifting each other's legs over the silI.

They were nluttering about the misfortune of having to fly past their boss, Michael,

who had been standing at the entrance to the hospitaI. Once inside they sat down on

the windowsil1, their wings crushed awkwardly against the glass, swinging their

legs and listening.

"Nothing yet," said one, and got out a heap ofknitting from a gold-spangled

shoulder bag. They both began knitting camouflage tank-tops. A ball of two-toned

green wool fell on the floor and rol1ed across the linoleul11 under Carmen' s bed.

"Do you remember when l had the gastro at home on the farm?" said

Maude, trying to ignore them.

"Yeah, that was bad. It was the only time J had to look after you. You were

hard to look after. So bossy even though you could hardly ITIOve. "

"Not that bossy," said Maude.

"Very bossy. Very very bossy. And l had to look after the others."

"Gave you a taste of what l lived with aIl the time."

"Except when you had to go to the presbytère for your translations," said

Carmen archly, sidling along the bed towards Maude.

"Yes," said Maude. "Abbé Hormidas. And now he's given I11e ail the relies

from Precious Blood. 1 can 't keep them any l11ore, Reggie is going bananas. 1'11

keep a few for I11yself but l have to find a good place .for the rest of them.What

should l do with them?"

"Oh yes, l 'm really the person to ask about that," said Carmen with a

scratchy Jaugh. 126

"No, really," said Maude. "What should l do?"

Carmen bowed her head and shut her eyes. There was a pause in the

clickety-click of the needles and the angels looked up avidly from their knitting.

"Bum them," she said. "And then toss the ashes in the river. The river! That

would be the place. Like when Dad scattered Aunt Edna' s ashes in the river. He

'dumped them off the starboard side of the Levis ferry, and they aIl blew back in his

face, remember? He forgot that there was a west wind. And the other passengers,

do you relllem ber? They were a11 brushing Aunt Edna off their fur coats, they were

furious! Mum used to laugh herself sick over that and Dad used to get mad at her

every time."

The two sisters laughed together, a bubbling sound like milk bottles

emptying.

"No l can 't," said Maude at last. "Honllidas would hate that. He didn 't

believe in cremation. And l love those relics."

"Why? Just explain that to me will you. Briefly."

"Bones ... the bones ofholy people. The bon es stay, even though the flesh is gone. They are still here. Hormidas used to say that aIl that is left ofus, when we die, is love."

Carmen shook her head as if to settle the quarrels inside it.

"ls that what he called it, love, eh? You and him and your translations."

"At least he gave me a break fro]11 the crowd ofyou," said Maude, fighting back.

"What sort of a break did he give you?" 127

"He broke me aIl right," said Maude. Her defences were falling at last. There

was no turning back.

"Broke what?"

"Broke everything. My innocence, my childhood. My faith, my ... "

"Your hynlen."

"Bless him, yes he did."

"Bless him? What are you talking about? The old lecher, 1 hope he burns in

hel1. "

"1 don 't know. 1 don 't know," said Maude in distress. "Perhaps 1 was old

enough to know better." She looked up at the angeIs, but they smiled at her and

went on knitting. They \vere leaving her to suffer.

"Old enough, but what did you know of the worId?" said Carmen, "except

babies and weeding and chuming the butter. And Dad, aIl proud that his own

Maudie was Abbé Hormidas's favourite! l've got to lie down now. Move."

Maude shifted to the end of the bed and Carmen Iay down, tears faIIing off the side ofher face on to the pillow. Maude gave a deep sigh. Carmen had kept hold of aIl the bittemess on Maude's beha]fthat she herseIfno longer felt.

"But why didn 't you ever talk to me again, Maudie? You put a big wall up between the two of us. 1 couJd have helped you. We could have had a big laugh. 1 could have protected you."

"1 didn 't want to be protected. And 1 didn 't want to scandalize you. 1 wanted to protect you, from nly corrupt life."

"Oh to heU with that."

"} 'm sorry," said Maude. 128

"]t's okay," said Carmen, with immediate and radiant siInplicity, sitting up again. "Perhaps we can finaIly talk. Ifyou can remember how."

"We've still got our lives ahead ofus," said Maude. "To catch up."

"Except that J'nl a wreck, Maude. l'm an accro. A junkie. An addict."

"We'll work on that. l'Il help you. There's .... there's people praying for you."

The angels nodded solemnly, not looking up from their knitting.

"Tell thenl not to! Tell them to mind their own damn business," said

Carmen. There was a giggle from thewindowsill.

"But you are their business. Okay, forget it," said Maude. "Let's go get a coffee. Are you allowed?"

"] ' 11 take you to our 10vely Casse-Croute. Can you hold my arm? l'ln too wobbly, l don 't walk about much yet."

* * *

They arrived just as Tom launched himself at the back ofDavid's head. Out of the corner of her eye Maude saw him fly through the air, like a cartoon cat pouncing, hackles up, fur flying, elnitting a hair~raising yowl. David spun around in confusion, letting go of Violet and dropping the dagger. Yannick dove into the space in front of him and grabbed the dagger before David whirled back around again and then

David let out a cry and dropped to the floor, clutching his head and sobbing "ow ow ow ow ...... ". Tom shd out from underneath hün as he fell, and the people at the tables aIl rose to their feet again in a wave. 129

"Shhhhh, it's just your hair," said the man in the Mackinaw to David kindly.

"It got badly pulled."

y annick ran up to the counter of the Casse Croûte and handed the dagger to

the doughnut woman, who brandished it like a pirate and then slotted it neatly

between two giant cartons of Joe Louis cakes. It was as if the two ofthern had

handled just such a situation together dozens of times.

"That's right," she said to Yannick's back as he turned away. "Don't worry,

dear, he'll never get it in here."

Violet, standing in the n1iddle of the room, l ifted her hand to her cheek and

touched a deep knife wound, then looked at her fingers with horror. She shoved her

hand in her pocket, looking guiltily around the room, as if ashamed.

Suddenly everyone was running. Maude ran towards Violet, and Violet ran

towards Yannick, and Yannick ran towards David, and TOl11 ran towards Carmen.

The Security guard got to David first, pulling him roughly to his feet.

David's jacket was up around his ears and his face was blotchy with rage and

despair.

"Leave him," said Yannick. "He's okay. } work here. }'11 take care ofhirn."

"Oh no, you won 't," said the Security guard, spinning David expertly around

and catching both his arms behind his back. "This one is dangerous."

"He's not dangerous. He's not weIl. He's overwrought. l'Il take care of him."

"Get real!" snapped the Security guard. "He' s just assaulted and threatened to ki Il sOll1eone." 130

Tom was looking at Violet. She looked as though she were about to scream, and he wasn't sure why.

''l'lllook after hÎ1n," said Yannick, "because he's my brother."

"Ohhhhhhhhhh ..... " a long sigh went up from the people at the tables.

"They're brothers!"

"He could be your grandmother's parrot for aIl 1 care," said the Security guard. "He' s coming with me."

"David, it's okay. l'Il come and get you later, okay?"

"This is all your fault," spat David at Violet. "You should never have interfered. "

"WeIl, Yannick?" said Carmen, her arms circling Tom. "Who's it going to be? It looks as though you're going to have to choose."

"Never mind, Carmen," said Violet. "Forget it."

"He's going to have to choose!" said the man in the wheelchair.

"He's going to have to choose!" they aIl repeated.

"Choose the girl!" shouted the telephone woman.

"Yes, choose the girl!" they a11 shouted.

"David, listen to 1lle," said Yannick. David was twisting this way and that trying to escape fronl the Security guard, who was starting to pull him towards the elevator. "Listen to Ine. Violet is Illy friend. She's more than my friend. l love her. 1 love her. l love her. Okay? l can love her and still' love you. 1 can."

"Can you?" said Carmen skeptical1y.

"Can he? Can he love them both?" said the Mackinaw man. 131

"1 doubt it," said the woman at the Casse-Croute. "He's a handful, that one."

She found a cloth and started to wipe the sugar off herself. "Lord, what a sight 1

am!"

"Can I?" asked Yannick.

"l'nl not asking you to," said Violet, stamping her foot, tears blurring her

eyes.

"You '11 have to prote ct her from him, or you' ll have me to answer to," said

Carmen.

"And me," said Tom.

"And Tonl," said Carmen with her hoarse smokey laugh. "And he's the

more reliable of the two."

"Y ou can do it, Yannick," said Maude. "You 've a life to lead too."

Violet looked at her mother in astonishment.

The doughnut WOlllan was brushing away a tear. Mascara was smeared

across the back of her hand. Yannick slumped into a chair, his body moulding into

the plastic form as if defeated. He slowly lifted his head to see the elevator doors

close. A slice of David 's anguished face snapped shut. AlI heads were pointing

towards the doors, and then aIl swivelIed back to Yannick.

"That's up to Violet. It's probably too late now. Violet. l'm sorry. 1 didn't put you first, even though 1 wanted to. It's a promise 1 made. 1 should have told you."

"Perhaps it's not too late," said Violet, as if in a dream. Then with a start she said it, again: "Perhaps it's not too late." She walked towards him. 132

The snowflakes were in a frenzy. Th,e people at the tables sighed, stared out

of the window shaking their heads, and lit cigarettes, as if a TV show had just

finished.

Violet reached down to him and touched his uptumed hands. The toes of

their boots met. Then she straightened his hoody and smoothed the hair back from

his forehead. She pulled him to his feet.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go."

Tom looked across frOlTI the circle ofhis mother's arms to his Aunt Maude,

and was suddenly surprised to see her here. She was cocking her head slightly, as if

listening to something very faint. He listened too, and thought he heard a fluttering,

as of a flock ofbirds rising from the shore.

* * *

The next evening Maude's prayer group was meeting in the living room.

There was a WOlTIan who had been Protestant but had now become a Catholic. There were those who couldn't get out of the habit of praying for the heathen, and for these women this convert was the darling of the group, the fruit of their prayers. She was a frail W01TIan with long prehensile-Iooking hands in which she was twisting an orange silk scarf and telling the others her story.

"My father always said, beware of the idolatry of the Virgin Mary," she was saying querulously. "And lTIy brother said worshipping the Virgin Mary would be

Iike the Beatles fans worshipping the Beatles' lTIothers." She looked around, hoping 133

for sorne sort of definitive refutation ofthese arguments that had served her family

faithfully for generations.

Maude imagined herself sitting in Mrs Lennon's kitchen in Liverpool. The

doorbell rings, and it's the Beatles fans come to do obeisance. Mrs Lennon is wiping

her floury hands on her apron and touching the scarfwrapped around her head,

under which the curlers stick out in front like sausages. "Don't mind me, ducks," she

smiles regretfully at Maude, leaving the kitchen and stubbing out her cigarette in the

hall. Maude liked women like that.

"1 say, give Mary a chance and see for yourself," she said aloud to the

convert. Perhaps Mrs-Lennon-Mary would be a little kinder than Palestinian-Mary,

more understanding about teenagers at least. Maude thought she'd give her a go.

They aIl fe11 quiet when Violet calne downstairs, slowly and carefully,

wrapped in a pale blue dressing gown. She had a day off and had been sleeping aIl

day. Maude looked sharply up at her. She had washed her hair, at last, which was

still wet and shone in dark tangles on her shoulders. A good sign, perhaps.

"Y ou okay, darling?" she said, rising as helplessly as a marionette at the

sight of her child who was always so pale these days, either so hurt or so sick, she

didn't know which. Violet got up, went to work, came back, shut herself in her

bedrool11 , slept. Maude sank down again right away. Violet would never tell her

anything, never ask for anything, she would never know a thing. She ahnost longed for the days when Violet fought back, shinnied down the drainpipe at night, shouted at her father.

Violet hesitated at the foot of the stairs, looking across the praying women at her mother anchoring herself so painfully back to the sofa. For the first tinle in 134

weeks, Violet went and kissed her, stepping carefully among the chairs and the women's purse straps. Maude was so surprised that she blushed. The other women watched thelll, smiling in wan envy, wishing they had such good relationships with their own daughters.

"Come with me," said Maude, getting up and threading her way through the vv'omen, leading Violet by the hand into the privacy of the kitchen. "Y ou need something to eat."

"Oh Mum," said Violet.

"What?" said Maude. "What is it?"

"1 had this dream," said Violet, "this weird dream."

"What happened? tell me," said Maude, plugging in the kettle as calmly as she could and making for the refrigerator.

"Mary, you know, the Virgin Mary, was having her baby, having contractions. She lay down on the floor of the stable, and she asked me to help her.

So me and Joseph we held her sides and we held the sides ofher face and she screallled and bellowed."

"Yes, that'd be Mary," said Maude, tuming to face her.

"And] held her and told her to keep breathing, that it wasn't time to push yet, and she was sweating, and her neck was all arched and the light was coming in through the slats of the stable and _" Violet hesitated and then went on. "The light looked like knives, on her belly, and she was pushing and 1 was between her legs and she was pushing and then -"

"Yes," said Maude. 135

"Then, there was this creature that came swimming out, in a flood of blood,

aIl yellow and blue and red."

"Yes," said Maude, "that'd be Jesus."

"Joseph took the baby but l stayed to clean up Mary; she was su ch a mess, l

had to wipe away a11 the blood, but'then she said, Wail - wait!"

. In the middle of the night Violet used to come into their bedroom as a child

and tell Maude her dreams. Even waking from a deep sleep, Maude could never

resist them, whispering questions in the dark until Violet had recounted everything

down to the last detail.

"She said WAIT!" said Maude encouragingly.

"And then she changed places with Ille - "

"Yes," said Maude. Anguish shook the Iandscape of her daughter's white

face like an earthquake. The Stations of the Cross in a single spasm. A pained

understanding began to chop at Maude's eagemess to hear the story.

"And she struggled to get up and then she said, 'Let me clean y ou up'. And

then it was me lying there all bloody and she was the one who washed me and

cleaned it aIl away, aIl the blood, shewas with me, and then she looked me right in the eyes, with - l can 't tell you - and she lifted me up off the floor, and put me on n1y feet - "

"Yes, 1 see - " said Maude, her hands shivering, still not daring to take

Violet in her arms. You can look a11 you like for it, she thought, but truth happens in spite of your attelllpts to be casual with the eggs, with the coffee, a11 that paddling upstrealll. You look and look, but you can only be ready. Violet was looking intently at her, as if for the first time. 136

"And then she put her baby into my arms, and she said, 'He's yours.'"

"Yes," said Maude with a gasp, "that would be -"

But now they were in each other's arms, and Violet was sobbing, and Maude was saying to her daughter, l'm so sorry, my sweet, you should have told me, oh my God l should have guessed, oh Violet. You should have told me. 137

Chapter 12

Earth

It was spring at last. The car was packed. Reggie had loaded the crate into the trunk

and sent them off, slapping the roof of the car with relief.

Yannick drove, and David was beside him. Violet was in the back with

Maude and TOI11. Yannick was taking themall back to the family farm. There they

w ere going ta bury the relics in a place Yannick said was holy. Maude wasn 't sure

about Yannick's idea ofholy ground, but what curé was going to let her bury a crate

of relies in his churchyard? Yannick's excitement about the idea of going back to

the fafI11 was consecration enough.

"What sort of a holy place is it, Yannick?" asked Maude as they passed the

ParliaI11ent. .

"I1's undemeath a huge old black walnut tree. l worshipped there as a child."

"What do you mean you worshipped there?" asked Violet.

"} discovered it on my own. There's no path up there, l was just I11essing

about in the woods when } found it on the sideof a little valley. l couldn 't believe it.

You'll see, it is the hugest tree you have ever seen: you can't even begin to put your arnls around it."

"Mum, does a tree being really big I11?ke it holy?" said Violet facetiously.

"What else about it?" said Maude, ignoring Violet.

"Something, l don 't know. 1 started going there often when my mother was il1. There is a spring just below it. 1 washed and drank at the spring before 1 went up to the tree. 1 don 't know why, 1 felt 1 should." 138

"What did you do there?"

"1 just sat undemeath it with the dog. It was company. It gave me something,

1 don't know - 'strength."

"But there are new people living there now," said David. "They said 1 wasn't allowed back."

"We' Il go in through the gravel pit," said Yannick, "across the pond on the

Turtle Bridge, then sneak a]ong the cedar-rail fence through the swamp."

"But we can 't hide going across l 'Insolite," said David. "They might see us."

"Yes , but we can tell if someone is cOlning, and then it's aIl clear through to le Bazoche."

"Yes! " shouted David. "1 hope they don 't catch us."

On his llledication he was obsessed with rules. He gathered rules and laws as he heard them mentioned, and wrote them in a little book. He was afraid to break even the Inost trivial one. At night instead ofwatching television he reread them over and over and tried to lnemorize them.

"What's le Bazoche?" asked Violet.

"The bosquet," said David excitedly, "where Wolff and 1 used to go squirre] hunting, you know."

"No, 1 don 't," said Violet.

"Squirrel hunting with a wolf?" asked TOln.

"} wonder if our blind is there still," said David. "Do you think so, Yan?"

"And if Illy tree is still there!" Yannick was ahllost as excited as David. 139

They drove down the hill past the façade of St. Vincent de Paul's church still teetering on the hillside. The squeegee boys who stood at the lights spent their leisure time decorating it with spraycans, holy artisans protected by Blessed

Catherine de Saint-Augustin. You could see the remains of the spiral staircases going up each tower. lt was indecent to have those graceful stairs exposed to the four winds, Maude thought. The front steps led up to neat domes of sky with a floor of lower town, but where the city used to end, now the suburbs were crawling out to the l11ountains. You could almost see the movement with the naked eye.

"It's like a disease," said Maude.

"What is?" asked Yannick.

"The suburbs. They've ahllost reached the mountains."

"1 know. l hate them."

"Why?" said Tom, who always envied people who lived in suburbs, had cars, and went shopping in malls.

"Il' s ail the best land they use," said Yannick. "They tear ail the trees out and rip off the topsoil so you can 't grow anything there any more."

"But aIl those nice houses," said Tom, "with yards and swimming pools."

"1 think it's ugly, with aIl those houses," said Yannick. "It's like the garbage on the Plains the l110rning after Saint-Jean Baptiste. Then they try to patch it up with turfthat they've stripped off sorne other farnl."

"Where will people find peace," sighed Maude, "with no more fields, no nlore wilderness?"

"Where will the birds go?" said Yannick, "and the animaIs?"

"No Inore hunting," said David. 140

"There are raccoons in the city," said Violet. "They're cute."

"Did you grow up on a farm too?" Yannick asked Maude.

"Yes. 1 miss it."

"Me too."

"Me too," said David.

They fell silent for a while.

"But 1 don 't miss the work," added Yannick, with fading conviction.

Maude thought about the relics bouncing along in the back of the car. She

expected IllOSt of them to take no interest in the suburbs of Quebec. They were from

Europe, and most Europeans she'd met looked down on Quebec. They mocked the

bio-monotony; they despised its short, unexceptional history. Only one change of

régÏ1ne, a couple of slnall rebellions, but mostly endless constitutional bickering.

And they mocked its jumped-up peasant bad taste. Once a peasant, always a

peas an t, was the European attitude. Impeccably polite to you, because they knew

how to be polite, but underneath, scom. Except towards the Inuit, of course, who

still rightly knew how to I1ve like the primitive people that they were, so were to be preserved, like the polar bears and the narwhal. In reality the Inuit were all now

living in little suburban houses perched on the permafrost watching TV and zipping about on skidoos.

Surely the contempt ofthose European saints was now gone now, fal1en away quietly like the flesh off their bones. Everything that isn 't love falls off when you die, Hormidas said, and on the other side, when they met again, everything that was inconlplete about their love would be completed. But then perhaps we living are responsible for the dead, too, thought Maude. 141

She had prayed for Hormidas, that he would be forgiven if he had done

anything that was keeping him separate him from God. And then one day, walking·

down La Fabrique, she had understood that she was the one who had to forgive him,

for him to be released. Not blame him for Carmen, for Violet, for the insufficiencies

of her own marriage, or any other miseries - his sins were only persisting in her, in

the living. Wh en she had suddenly seen this, a flutter of angels who were clustered

intently around a manhole had confirmed her intuition by swarming up her legs and

hanging joyfully offher hips like trapeze artists, singing sorne pop song they must

have heard coming out of one of the clothing stores. She let them pluck the

resentInent out of her and drop it on the sidewalk, where it ran off and trickled

through a grate into the storm drains.

The saints had certainly been working hard ever since they arrived in her

front room. Now they were being very demure in the back, where Reggie had put

them. You'll be in the ground, she said to them. The ground needs protection too,

you know. Ifyou don't protect it now you'll have a much harder job later on. She

couldn't speak out loud to them, though, it made Violet so angry. She contented

herselfwith dreaming about a future when the new suburbs would be abandoned, perhaps· after a fire. Like the tires that regularly tore throughthe city two centuries ago, leaving nothing but a forest of stone chimneys. But a fire would have a hard time nlaking it across those suburban lawns and jumping over a11 those above- ground swiml11ing pools.

Perhaps a war, then, or an epidemic. Even no more gasoline might do it. The houses abandoned, then gradually the weeds growing up through the deserted highways and gaining back the ground through the cracked and fissured crescents in 142

the subdivisions. Fleabane would be the first to come back, she thought, then

burdock and dandelion and lamb's quarters. Perhaps devil's paintbrush or cinquefoil

would deign to participate in the Reclamation, after a while. The new floral

aristocracy. But then the Manitoba maples and hawthom would take over for a

generation or two. Perhaps she should go out and scatter sorne elm or sugar maple

seeds to cut short the scrub phase. Perhaps sorne black walnuts. The roads at this

time of year were pitted with potholes left by months of freezing, thawing, salting,

ploughing. Potholes in French were nids-de-poule - hens' nests. She always

expected to see hens sitting on the potholes in spring, clucking with irritation and

shuffling their feathers as the trucks roared by, rattling their eggs. She could give

the hens each a handful of grain to deflect their attention and then quickly slip sorne

black walnuts in amongst the eggs. Perhaps she could raise a cohort of angels to

help out.

But then there was the problem of where the suburban people would aIl go if their houses disappeared. Especially the babies. There weren 't enough emergency shelters.

"Where will we find enough food for everyone?" she sa id aloud in agitation.

"Muln," said Violet, "you packed a picnic that would feed halfthe population of Quebec. And probably the Communion of Saints as weIl."

"That might do it, then," said Maude, settling back down in her seat.

They were heading out east a]ong the river. She saw a golden Christ with his anllS outspread, standing between the twin spires of St. Malo' s. The Lord was blessing thel11 on their way. Or are you crying for help? asked Maude. Or perhaps 143

for something to eat? But an angel caught her by the chin and moved her head into

forward position again. Blessing you, it said in a camp squeak, is right.

She looked out past the Beauport flats where her father used to hunt snipe,

past to the île d'Orléans, where the spring runoff was cascading from the cli ff every

few hundred yards. Past the island bridge where great sprawling willows.

congregated on the riverbanks like ancestors. An empty barn stood next to a new

pink apartment building. The old life still elbowed insistently at the new, nudging it

to remember. BjlIboards advertised Démènagement à bon prix, and Bingo tous les jours. Maude looked hungrily into the ditches at the luminous new willow and

dogwood branches, glowing yellow and red. Casual patches of dirty snow still

straggled across the land. But in between theln, the dark rich earth of the valley, divided up 400 years ago into long narrow slightly convex fields, emitted a faint rumble ofpleasure as the world heated up.

They were passing St. Anne de Beaupré. Is it okay, Maude asked Saint

Anne, is it okay if we bury these bones under Yannick' s holy tree? But the huge basilica went past in a flash. She gave a little cry.

"What is it?" asked Yannick. "Did you want to stop?"

"Oh please, no," said Violet.

"Ifyou don't mind," said Maude, "just for a minute."

"A Ininute," said Violet, "and that's aIl."

The car tires squealed as Yannick did a wheelie in the middle of the road, upsetting a row of angels perched on the telephone wires. They rose as one, laughing, and then settled again, preening their feathers. The car caIne to a haIt at the Blessings Booth. A priest was out in the parking lot blessing an old pink cadillac 144

with chrome wingtips while a Naskapi couple in red bandanas and baggy tartan

shirts stood by, their heads bent in prayer. That old cadillac has to take them the

1000 km home again to Natashquan, reflected Maude. A long way to come to pay

homage to the Holy Ancestors.

The others fo11owed Maude into the Basilica and stood for a minute in the

towering darkness, cowed by the echo of shoes on nl0saic floors. They moved

forward with the hesitant anxiety of people who never go to church, afraid to stray

into a forbidden area or raise their voices ab ove a whisper. David gazed up in awe at

the crutches hanging on the pillars.

"Why are a11 those crutches hanging there?" he asked.

"Because people were healed here and didn 't need their crutches any more,

so they left them behind," said Maude.

"It's gross," said Violet. "Look at that false knee."

"Who healed them?" asked David.

"Saint Anne. She took their messages to Jesus."

"Who' s Saint Anne?"

"She' s his grandlllother. There' s a relic of her armbone over there."

"Sweet!" said David, "can we go and see?"

Maude took his arnl and with Tom holding her other hand they ,vent over to the nOlih side of the basilica, where people were kneeling at the foot of a statue of

Saint Anne. A woman in a black lacy dress and very high heels was writing sornething on a little piece of paper as she knelt, and then she put it in a box at

Anne' s feet.

"Are those the messages she takes?" asked David. 145

"Yes."

"When everyone has left does she get them out and read them ~ll?" asked

Tom.

"She doesn 't need to, she knows before they even write it down."

"Why do they write it down then?"

"Perhaps it helps them to write it down," said Maude. "Shhh now. l have to listen. You boys can talk to her too if you want."

"But not out loud," said David.

The three of them knelt on a kneeler that circled the statue and were quiet for a lTIinute until David let out a sharp little fart and Tom giggled .

. "Oh quit it," whispered Maude, without opening her eyes.

"1 couldn't help it," said David. "l'm hungry."

"So am l," said Tom. "Can we stop at Tim Hortons in Baie Saint-Paul on the way?"

"Yes! Can we?" said David. "} used to go there with Wolff, when we brought the ste ers up to ... " his voice trailed off.

"Did you say with a wolf?" said Tom, his eyes still squeezed very tight shut.

"Quiet, you two," hissed Maude.

There was a short silence again.

"Madame Lablanchet?" said David.

"Yes?"

"Y ou remind me of my mU1TI. She used to take lTIe places too. Sometimes.

Before she got sick." 146

Maude opened her eyes slowly. The dome ofDavid's great forehead shone dully in the gloom. His eyes glittered at her like the gold-flecked mosaic tiles on the ceiling.

"Your mum?"

"My mum is dead," he said, "but could you be my grandmother?"

"What about Violet?" Maude whispered, putting her hand on his clamn1y one and squeezing it gently. "You have been very hard on her."

"1 can try."

"Can you promise never to hurt her?"

"1 promise, Madame Lablanchet."

Maude knew this was no small thing David was asking her, here at Saint

Anne' s feet. She took a stubby pencil, untangled its string and wrote Shall J ... on a slip ofpaper, but before she'd finished she stopped.

"Say yes," said David.

"Say yes," said Anne.

"But he's hard to love," said Maude.

"l'Il be good," said David.

"l'Il be there," said Anne, "and so will Yannick."

"lt's aIl right for you," said Maude. "Y ou just had Mary and Joseph to contend with. The perfect couple."

"Y ou don 't think Mary was trying at times?" Anne reminded her. "Running offwith a carpenter twice her age who kept going on about his drealTIS? Loaded my daughter on a donkey and took her off to Egypt. N ever even had enough money for a motel. Joachim was livid." 147

Maude had stopped listening. She was looking at David' s lower lip from

which right at this moment a spool of drool was descending to the circular velvet

elbow-cushion as he looked anxiously at her, waiting for the answer. Beyond hi m,

in the transept, Maude saw her daughter lead Yannick over to a bank of votive

candIes and then Violet was speaking to him, gazing into the few gently flickerjng

points of warm light as she spoke. She heard the echo of a coin clatterjng into the

box as he bought a candIe. Their faces suddenly lit up froln below as Violet lit the

candIe with a long taper. They stood looking down at their candIe in silence, not

touching. Maude averted her eyes: it was painfully private. But she couldn 't resist

glancing back again. They were kneeling, and Yannick had his arm around Violet,

and then he was kissing her eyes. Maude turned back to David. 1t was lnadness of

course but that was better than the alternative.

1 . 148

Part II Passing by the Dragon: An Analysis of the Influence of Faith and Religious Culture in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and Louisa Blair's "Nearer Than the Eye" 149

The dragon sils by the side of the raad, watching thase wha pass. Beware lest he devaur yau. We ga ta the Father afSauls, but it is necessary ta pass by the dragon.

- St Cyril of Jerusalem)

In spite of the Enlightenment's Christian ancestors, theology and religious practice have long been marginalized by the ideological heirs of the Enlightenment who dominate academia. In reaction to this, postmodern literary critics are taking a new iriterest in religion. While the Protestant Reformation served to deconstruct premodem Catholic decadence in culture and society, says Mark Bosco in his book Graham Greene 's Cathalic

Imaginatian, "Catholic ideologies are now being engaged to critique what has evolved into a form of decadent secularism" (Bosco 13). The dominant metanarrative, as postmodernists would put it, has for too long emphasized the artificial constructs of reason and the focus on the self, while the postmodernist interest in ambiguity, affectivity, indeterminacy, irrationality and otherness has led to a new openness to religious fiction with its "continuaI irruption of otherness and strangeness into culture and society (Bosco

13)."

In writing lny novella "Nearer Than the Eye" 1 did not set out to write a Catholic novel, but after reading Flannery O'Connor's fiction, her comments as a Catholic on faith, culture and literature, and a number of critical cOlnmentaries on her work, 1 began in retrospect to wonder if and how "Nearer Than the Eye" reflects a Catholic imagination, both in terms oftheology and culture. In discussing O'Connor, theologians have at their disposaI a language that clearly defines questions ofbelief, faith and doctrine, while literary

1 "No matter what fonn the dragon may take, it is ofthis mysterious passage past him , or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concemed to te]] , and this being the case, it requires considerable courage 150

critics tend to approach metaphysical concems such as evil and miracles in terms of the grotesque (evil) or magic realism (miracles). But to explore the term "Catholic imagination," one perhaps needs both languages, that of theology and that of literary criticism; moreover, su ch a discussion raises important questions about the boundaries between the two and whether one can do without the other. In this essay l will principally discuss my novella "Nearer Than the Eye" and Flannery O'Connor's novella Wise Blood to grapple with what is Catholic about them and the usefulness of combining these languages in appreciating thenl.

Although religion is omnipresent in O 'Connor's story, her characters are grotesque and most of the action is propelled by violence. Love, lnercy and redemption seem conspicuous only by their absence. These difficulties have only served to multiply critical debates about her work and what, if anything, qualifies it as Catholic. Critics have taken various approaches to the question. l will examine how these approaches relate to Wise

Blood, and later sift out which of their definitions of Catholic literature, if any, are relevant to "N earer Than the Eye."

Sorne critics examine an author's Catholic influences and then move from there to what is particularly Catholic about his or her literary concems. Patrick Samway in "How

Flannery O'Connor's Fiction Can be Considered Roman Catholic" has searched her

Catholic influences for clues to an aesthetic that is distinctively Catholic. He notes her

Thomistic background and her reading of the French theologians of the Catholic Revival, particularly Jacques Maritain. Maritain developed a Catholic aesthetic in his Creative

Intuition in Art and Poetry, a work heavily annotated by O'Connor. She underlined his

at any time, in any country, not to tum away from the storyteller." (O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer and Hi s Country" 806.) 151

definition of art as something that "draws beauty from ugly things and monsters ... [that] tries to overcome the division between beautiful and ugly by absorbing ugliness in a superior species .of beauty" (Samway 167). Samway suggests that she shared Maritain' s vision. The presence of "ugly things and monsters" in her story is unquestionable, but almost the only beauty in it is the strange and haunting quality of her writing, which irradiates and transfonns but certainly does not absorb the ugliness. Perhaps in practice she adhered to a more earthy aesthetic. In a review of a book by literary critic William Lynch, she approves his vision of the Iiterary imagination as "founded on a penetration of the finite and the limited" (O'Connor, The Presence a/Grace and Other Book Reviews, 94). This phrase corresponds more closely to her fictional characters and contexts than Maritain 's definition regarding a superior species of beauty.

Mark Bosco observes that both F]annery O'Connor and Grahanl Greene were inspired by French Catholic writers such as Léon Blois, François Mauriac, Paul Claudel and Georges Bemamos, all of whom were reacting to the dominant discourse of

EnlightenInent philosophers and the antireligious doctrines of the French Revolution. He lists the concems th~t identify the Catholicity of these French writers as "the idea of the sinner, the idea of mystical substitution,2 the implied criticisln of materialism, and the tireless pursuit of the erring sou] by God" (Bosco 8). These four ideas are certainly ail driving forces in O'Connor's writings, too, as he points out, although how these ideas are worked out in her writing has caused endless debate, as l will discuss later.

Rather than looking at influences, other critics have COlne up with l1sts of generically Catholic ideas or preoccupations and then attempted to discem them in

2 Atonement for the sins of others by offering up one 's suffering on their behalf, in imitation of Jesus Christ.

------152

O'Connor's fiction. In The Catholic Imagination in American Literature, Ross Labrie notes two distinctly Catholic elements in O'Connor's writing: a radically polarized view of good and evil and an emphasis on the spiritual value of suffering (Labrie 212). In a similar approach, John May in Flannery O 'Connor and the Discernment ofCatholic Fiction chooses to talk instead about "literary analogues of Catholic belief," including "a world in which human beings are capable of genuine transformation and growth always in and through interaction with other human beings" (May 205). This sounds more like a statement out of a UN document than a literary analogue and does not reflect the world of

Wise Blood. One might find evidence of such growth in Iny novel, in which Maude could be said to grow by Inoving towards a more genuine interaction with her own sister and daughter, but this does not seem analogous to a belief system that is uniquely Catholic.

Another "literary analogue" listed by May is "a sense of evil or sin present in the world"

(212), a sense which is definitely present if not triulnphant in Wise Blood at every turn, although perhaps less obvious in "Nearer Than the Eye."

Sorne critics are scandalized by the apparently gross contradiction between

O'Connor's Catholicism and her thelnes. Johann McMullen, for example, wrltes of the

"failure of many of her stories to carry the burden of her doctrine." This critic wants to see a happy Catholic Inarriage or family here and there, but finds none (McMullen 8]). Her work is instead described as "a fictional adventure in family nlalevolence" (99). lnstead of synlpathetic people being watched over by a merciful God, McMullen finds "a consistently demeaning portrait ofhumanity" and "little evidence that their God is one of love and mercy" (100).

The variety oftheological interpretation of O'Connor's work alnong literary critics leads one to the conclusion that the distinctive quality of Catholic fiction has nothing to do 153

with the author but rather with the critics. Taking a theological as weIl as literary approach injects not only new possible colour combinations but added opportunities for vitriol. A work may be judged not just unsuccessful, but also execrable for not making Catholicism more attractive. It may even be denounced as heretical. Both O'Connor and Graham

Greene, for example, were attacked on these fronts and felt obliged to defend themselves.

Graham Greene resisted his fiction being called Catholic and described himself as "a novelist who happens to be CathoIic .... It' s the human factor that interests me, not apologetics" (Allain 150). But he was judged as ifhe were indeed writing apologetics and was accused of many forms ofheresy. In her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant

South," Flannery O'Connor describes how she, too, was attacked by Amerlcan Catholics for not edifying her readers as a good Catholic should, particularly for "failing to reflect hope, failing to show the church's interest in social justice, failing to show life as a positive good, failing to portray our beliefs in a light that will make them desirable to others" (854).

In this essayas well as in "The Fiction Writer and His Country'~ and "The Church and the

Fiction Writer," O'Connor never clearly defines what is ~atholic about her literature but insists again and again that art should not be utilitarian and that Catholic literature above aIl should not be about virtuous people or be designed to promote adherence to the Catholic faith.

"Nearer Than the Eye" is not a Catholic novella in any of these senses either. There is one character in the novel, Maude, who is explicitly Catholic, and while her visions of angels and conversations with relics may be absurd, there is SOITIe discussion of her relationship with the church and the practice of her faith. The noveIla does not, however, provide lTIodels ofvirtuous characters; most ofthem are busy escaping from their alienation in drugs, sex, or religious delusions, and succeed in breaking almost every Catholic moral 154

injunction, including a fornicator-priest, a drug-addict mother and a teenager who has multiple sex partners and an abortion. The characters rarely think charitably towards each other and are sometimes violent. The novella does not preach how to resolve moral dilemmas. Violet, for example, faces a moral dilemma when she gets pregnant but will not or cannot face it.

Greene's novels are also notably devoid ofvirtuous people or other obvious signs of promoting adherence to the Catholic faith. His protagonists are often desperate and lonely alcoholics who visit brothels, commit adultery and betray their friends or their country. He once conceded that "there does exist a pattern in my carpet constituted by Catholicism, but one has to stand back in order to make it out" (Allain 159). Both he and O 'Connor in sist that what could be described as Catholic is nothing as explicit as plot, theme or character, nor is it the lnodelling of virtue or the promotion of faith, and furthermore that close exalnination, which is one of the things literary critics like to do, cannot bring it to the fore.

O'Connor's novella Wis e Blood is even further than Greene's novels from the conventional definition of what makes a novel Catholic. Although there is much talk of

Jesus, and Hazel Motes is clearly on sorne kind of spiritual journey, the characters are grotesquely warped, emotionally, spiritually and even physically; they Inock, insult, exploit, ignore and even kill each other, and the main decision that Hazel Motes takes at the end, to blind hÎlnself in atonen1ent for his sins, is a fanatical act of self-mutilation whose reden1ptive value is doubtful. ,

Richard Giannone bravely tries to elnbrace O'Connor's violence as part of "the risky spacîousness of faith in which [she] invites the reader to dwell" (Giannone xiii). In her schelne ofthings, this appalling violence is a kind of collision with God's love, one that 155

"can do real injury to the body" but may be the only way that "those with an incapacity for intimate relationship" can experience grace. This vision, he admits,

taxes the moral imagination to the uttermost. To be sure, this

personal bond with God requires a drastic readjustInent of our

thinking about justice and mercy to surrender to O'Connor's thesis

of grace, which is that narcissists, two-bit tyrants, and murderers win

the heart of God by blaspheming, oppressing and killing. But if one

sees their cruelties as desperate cries of dereliction by unloved

searchers who believe themselves unlovable and yet seem to eam

the attention of God, then the intrusion of grace makes sense (xiv).

The hidden face of love, says Giannone, is suffering, the suffering of Christ on the cross. In contemplating the crucifixion, he points out, it is equally hard to see "a glimlner of any good omen in this wracked body" (xv).

Some critics have tumed to the vision ofBiblical characters other than Christ to understand O'Connor's strange theology. Albert Sonnenfeld, for instance, identifies

O'Connor's theology of the "essential violence of salvation" (Sonnenfeld 1972, 455) with the pre-Christian Inessage of repentance preached by the prophet John the Baptist, a message that invades the Gospel of Matthew in various verses including: "Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire" (King Jalnes Version,

Matt. 3.10); and "The kingdom ofheaven has suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matt. 11.12), which O'Connor interprets as "The Violent Bear it Away" and uses as the title of another story. The theology of these verses seems a far cry from that of Christ' s 156

gentler words that follow soon afterwards: "Come unto me aIl ye that labour and are heavy laden, and l will give you rest ... my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matt. 11.28-30).

Giannone compares Hazel Motes to Saint Paul before his conversion (then known as Saul), a man of "notorious fury" who is obsessed by the letter of the law (Giannone 10).

Hazel Motes has developed his own form of anti-Christ righteousness that has striking parallels with Saul 's "habit of mind that leads to self-adoring legalism" (27). Hazel 's legalislll (he executes Solace Layfield, his double, to "restore truth") is a fulfilment ofhis moral training as a child, to obey without love. Returning from the carnival where he saw his father's lust, he felt guilty although he was blameless; now that he has murdered Solace, he is guilty and yet feels no blame. When the policeman demolishes his car, Hazel himself is finally judged by "the rigid law ofhis personal nihilism" (27). Only then, it seems, he

"sees" how blind he was and in penance walks home and blinds himself. "Even a modern reader schooled in penitentialliterature may find it hard to see mystical accomplishlllent in

Hazel ' s self-mortification," writes Giannone, who nevertheless spends the rest of his chapter on Wis e Blood desperately trying to see it himself.

While theology and Biblical references have added enormously to his analysis, it appears Giannone would have done better to drop the theological contortions at this point and slip discreetly into literary criticislTI, simply pointing out that to be authentic to his character and to the symllletry of the story, Hazel Motes could not have acted any differently. But that would be using cross-disciplinary analysis as a existential escape hatch, for this observation, too, has important theological implications concerning human freedom and determinism. Ifthere is an inevitability about Hazel 's act, owing to his upbringing and personality, and he has never been presented with the choice to deviate from this predetermined path, his destiny is progralllmed and he is not free. If he is not free he cannot 157

be justly held responsible for his actions. Critic Ben Satterfield observes thar"the novel is about a man who cannot help doing the things he does, and is therefore silly both as literature and as religious propaganda" (Satterfield 41). Hazel' s self-mutilation "affects no- one; people simply think he is mad (a reasonable deduction) and his death is a meaningless event ... Hazel punishes himself; he suffers and dies, and that is aIl" (Satterfield 33).

Stephen Webb is one critic who successfully combines the discourses of theology and literary criticism. ln Blessed Excess: Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination, he claims that O~Connor ~ s characters are frequently ~~instabilities on the verge of etemity, unknowing victims of a cosmic clash between good and evil" (Webb 10 1). The violence in her work "literalizes the metaphor of spiritual warfare," he explains, and fulfils the important literary trope of hyperbole, a literary tradition that has fallen into disuse, a victim of secular rationalism. One hope for its recovery, he believes, lies in the kind of extreme religion that O'Connor writes about. "Her stories explore the power ofhyperbole without moralizing or theorizing - or theologizing - on its capacity to restore, fit, and make sense" (91).

ln addition to Hazel' s act of bl in ding himself, the other aspect of Wise Blood that defies a "Catholic analogue" is the concept of "wise blood'~ itself. ln the novel, the expression "wise blood" is used not by Hazel Motes but by Enoch Elnery, who is driven by two parts ofhis brain; one part is "in communication with his blood," which tells hÎln what to do and sometilnes shouts orders at him. The other part is "stocked up with aIl kinds of words and phrases" (O'Connor, Wise Blood 49). Of the two parts ofhis brain, his blood seems to be the driving force of his decisions, and he claims he has "wise blood like his daddy"( 44). His daddy, however, had the "wisdom" to sell Enoch as a child to a woman fronl Boonville. If grace reveals the ultÎ1nate worth of the hunlan being in God' s eyes, 158

surely selling a child is the opposite and is the ultimate triumph of consumerism. Enoch's

wise b100d in the end drives him to give Hazel a shrivelled mummy sto1en from a museum

for his "Church Without Christ," and Enoch ends up sitting on a rock dressed as a gorilIa,

having "devolved back into anima1ity" (Giannone 21). So what exactly is wise about his

blood? Wisdom by this ironie definition seems to be obeying instinct without any

moderation by conscience or reason. Enoch, writes Giannone, is a grotesque, or "instinct

without spirit, action without responsibility ... is brute creation" (25). Far from being his

"means of g race," E noch 's blood has therefore betrayed him by propelling him help1essly

into a kind of evolutionary reversal.

O'Connor confuses the issue in her writings on Wis e Blood by suggesting that our

own blood contains the code of our sa1vation. "Everything works towards its true end or away from it, everything is ultimately saved or lost. Hazel is saved by virtue ofhaving wise blood," O 'Connor wrote to John Hawkes in Septernber, 1959 (O'Connor, Letter to John

Hawkes, 13 September, 1959, Col!ected WorksJ 1107). "It's too wise for hirn ultimately to deny Christ," she continues. "Wise blood has to be these people's means of grace - they have no sacrarnents. People in the south ... have nothing to correct their practical heresies so they work them out dramatically." When it cornes to Enoch, however, her remarks confinn that it is by virtue ofhis wise blood that Enoch is excluded frOlTI grace, too, in which case his wise blood is sÏ1nply a dramatic too1 for the author to "correct his practical heresies" by condelnning him to a subhuman status.

Jeffrey Gray argues that the blood of the characters may be conscious, volitiona1 and wise, but the characters themselves are p1ainly not. There seenls to be no will and no subject: "Bodies and other subjects hurl themse1ves at each other in a vacuum of will and consciousness," he writes, in a chaos ofviolence without agency (Gray 58). What is the 159

significance ofblood, bones and passion in "Nearer Tban the Eye"? There is a sense in which Violet's blood does indeed symbolize a new wisdom. After her abortion, ber blood confronts her with the inexorable nature of her own body and of the life it had engendered, which she was unable to acknowledge - life that is sacred because it is human. Her acknowledgement ofthis humanity leads to restored relationships with both her boyfri end and her mother. For Maude, bones are deeply ambiguous. They are literally a physical and tangible link to the saints, and thus to her faith, but a faith that is dying in her culture or is figuratively just a heap of dry and disintegrating bones. The conflation of the literaI and figurative meanings of words, and not just symbols, further endangers Maude' s faith when she realizes that by having an affair with her, Hormidas has stolen the deeper meaning of the words ofher faith. "She couldn 't tolerate hearing his religious language anymore. And the Word was made Flesh. She had to translate it, find other words, otherwise he would have stolen God from her, and that she would never have been able to forgive." (Blair 114).

She dwel1s on the mystery of the literaI and figurative meanings of passion when she prays the Anima Christi in Chapter Eight: "Passion of Christ, strengthen lne. Oh good Jesus, hear me. ln thy wounds, hide Ine" (Blair 103). ln the same way, Violet is intrigued and challenged by the symbolic logic of the crucifix on the wall above Yannick during their first lovemaking, where the two meanings of passion nleet again a generation hence (Blair

54). After David cuts Violet's face as he holds her captive in the hospital, she sees the blood on her fingers with horrified recogni60n - her secret is there for a11 to see (Blair

129). lt is also significant that Violet's secret is brought to light as a prisoner of the most

Inarginal person in the novel. Unable to master the social disguises that people put on to win status, David forces her to recognize the COlnmon building blocks of her own and 160

others' humanity. He strips her violently down to what she is made of, bones and blood, the

simplest and most inexorable truths ofwhat it means to be a living being.

AlI the debate about the Catholicity of O 'Connor's fiction might lead one to

conclude that discussing theology, including O 'Connor's own, may be a cul-de-sac into

which many earnest critics have been fruitlessly lured. As Anthony di Renzo writes, "few

writers since Milton have been so resented or applauded for supposedly justifying God's

ways to humankind, and few writers have been more frequently accused of secretly

be10nging to the devil's party. Orthodoxy or diabolism Ïsn't the secret of O'Connor's

peculiar and ambivalent laughter: style is" (Di Renzo 12). But before abandoning any

theological speculation whatsoever, let us return to what Bosco, in his discussion of

Graham Greene, diffidently caUs "predispositions" in the Catholic imagination. 1 can

recognize two ofthese predispositions in both mywork and that of O'Connor: "the

obsession with the effects of the doctrine of the Incarnation on hUlTIan life," and closely

connected, "the sacramental reality that stresses divine immanence in concrete reality"

(Bosco 15).

Predispositions are perhaps what Greene meant by the "pattern in the carpet." One

has to stand back a little to see thelTI. They do not have to dictate the shape or message of

fiction; rather, they are present in its background. The dictionary defines disposition as "the predolTIinant or prevailing tendency of one's spirits;,,3 a pre-disposition is therefore that which lTIakes one susceptible to this tendency of one's spirits. What makes one susceptible

is as mu ch cultural influence and contexts as doctrine, so 1 will turn now to these factors to explain my interest in incarnation and in the sacramentality of con crete reality.

3 "disposition." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) . Random House, Inc. 18 Sep. 2008. . 161

The setting of 0' Connor' s novella is the fundamentalist Baptist culture of the

American Deep South, known as the Bible Belt. O'Connor was thus a rare Catholic in a community that was itself marginalized by mainstream American culture. Her characters are the rural poor of Tennessee who are gradually making their way to the city and becoming more and more like the rest of the country. Our situations as authors are parallel but reversed. The setting of "Nearer Than the Eye," Quebec City in the 1990s, bears lnany traces of a powerful religious (and dogmatically rural) French-Canadian Roman

Catholicism that held sway almost unchallenged in Quebec until the 1960s.4 The family l was born into, however, was part of the small minority of Quebec anglophone Protestants with Baptist roots.

This religious culture-within-a-culture had a strong impact on our family traditions.

On Sundays my father as a child was not allowed to play games or ride his bicycle and no singing was allowed in the household except for hymns. This was because everyone remembered that his grandfather, before becoming a Baptist minister and emigrating to

Canada as a missionary, had been a singer and dancer in the music halls ofNorthem

England, considered by his later Saved self as dens of sin and iniquity. The only recreation allowed was reading the Bible. While sorne traces of Baptist rigidity affected my o\vn upbringing, ] was given uncensored access to the Bible, with its stories of war and migration, genocide, murder, rape, incest, love, sacrifice and redelnption.

l left Quebec City as a young child and retumed as an adult, a Catholic, a mother and a writer. ln the interinl 1 had spent many years working alongside Jesuit priests, whose faith lived out in action had influenced me deeply. In Quebec there was little left of the 162

anglophone Baptist culture of my grandmother. 5 The Catholic church, which had been such a powerful cultural, spiritual, educational and political force, was almost defunct. The only remaining signs were the large religious properties inhabited by a handful of elderly priests and nuns, the cavemous churches still dotted around town, and the saints, after whom every street, mountain, institution and neighbourhood had been named. Even the names of the saints, however, were fast being replaced with the names of politicians. Boulevard Saint-

Cyrille, for exalnple, named after the saint whose words about the dragon 1 use in the epigraph, had been renamed Boulevard René-Levesque, after a citizen who inspired a political independence rnovement. Rue Saint-Augustin had been renarned Rue des

Parlementaires. Indeed, aIl these last traces of a once-pervasive Catholic culture are now under threat, as citizens caB for the secularization of ail public institutions in the name of preventing any religion from ever imposing its stamp on the city again.6

As a Catholic, 1 was fascinated by the remains ofQuebec's religious culture and its dramatic transformation into a secular, political and increasingly materialist and individualist culture. 1 leamed why Quebecers had thrown off the stultifying repression the church inflicted on the population,? and yet 1 was fascinated with the dying culture of the devotion to the saints, which many modem Quebecers consider grotesque and embarrassing. As an anglophone of Protestant heritage, 1 was culturally as distant froln this

4 For a l11agnificent literary portrayal of Catholic French-speaking working-class culture in Quebec City in the 1940s, see Roger Lemelin's Au pied de la pente douce (1944) and Les Plo~~fJes (1948). 5 See Louisa Blair, The Anglos: A History of the English-Speaking People of Quebec City, vol. Il. Other than Louise Penny's latest detective novel, unpublished at the time ofwriting, there are only two novels about contenlporary Quebec City written by anglophone Quebecers: Nalini Warriar's The Enemy Withà1 (2005) set in the 1990s'and MaJcolnl Reid's Salut Gadou!, a children's novel set in 1980s in the St-jean-Baptiste neighbourhood. Both authors moved to Quebec City as adults. 6 For example, see the "Charte de Laicité" presented in "S'entendre sur notre identité: des politiques et des institutions conformes à nos valeurs" by the Collectif des Trois travaux (a group of young Quebec sovereigntists), presented to the Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, Quebec City, October 4, 2007. 163

religious history as if l were from an entirely different country, yet as a Quebecer, and now a Catholic Quebecer, l felt more than a passing interest. l felt a religious solidarity or affinity with the remnants of this cOInmunity and a desire to understand the passionate mysticism that was at the heart of the city's founding and in whose charged and almost ecstatic atmosphere the first settlers had lived and moved.8

This interest in Quebec Catholic culture is reflected in "Nearer Than the Eye," and research for the novel involved seeking to understand this abiding love for the saints that has so influenced the city, from 1639 when Marie de l'Incarnation was instructed to emigrate to Quebec by St. Joseph in a vision, to the 1840s, when the religious communities were still so attached to their relics that they were prepared to divide Jean de Brébeufs skull in halfto solve an argulnent over who should keep it (Blair 97).9

Flannery O'Connor observed in 1963 that the Catholic novelist in the South will feel "a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a departmeilt of sociology or culture or personality development" (O'Connor, "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" 859). If one replaces the South with Quebec, and the backwoods prophets with the mystic devotees of

7 See, for example, Denise Bombardier's Une enfance à l 'eau bénite (1990). 8 For example, see the di aries of Marie de l'Incarnation (1654) or the account of Mère Catherine de Saint- Augustin's life by Paul Rageneau, SJ (1671). 9 The Jesuits or "Blackrobes" gave up their project in Huronia in 1649, burned Ste-Marie to the ground and, after one more terrible winter on nearby Christi an Island, returned by canoe to Quebec. They carried with them Brébeufs skull, which they eventually handed over to the Soeurs Augustines de la Miséricorde de Jésus of Hôtel Dieu at Quebec for safekeeping. The Jesuits left Canada entirely shortly after the arrivai of the British. They did not return until 1840, by which tinle the sisters felt the revered skull was theirs by law of possession. To solve the ensuing argUlnent they sawed the skull in half, so that for 152 years half ofBrébeufs skull lay in the Martyrs' Shrine at Midland and the other half with the nuns at Quebec. In 1992 the Jesuits at Midland finally recovered the other half and glued it back together. See Th e Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenlh Century by Francis Parkman (Ch.28), and the Archives of the lesuits at Midland Martyrs' Shrine (http://www.martyrs-shrine.com/archiveslindex .cfm). ------

164

the saints, l share her sentiments. Unlike stories of political parties, constitutional changes and influential politicians, the stories of the saints are colourfu1 personal narratives fiIled with awe, mystery and sometimes fear. Best of aIl, for believers, one could talk to the saints and perhaps touch their relies, rnaking a tangible connection with etemity.

AlI this fonns a certain historical and cultural predisposition to take metaphysics seriously. But this is not the only impact that my religious background has on my narrative.

Another fonnative experience in my religious life was Ignatius Fann Community in

Guelph, Ontario, where 1 lived with lesuits and others in a community that welcomed people who had been in prison or in psychiatrie institutions and who had nowhere to go when they emerged except back into the institutions or onto the streets. We lived in communal houses and worked together on a large six-hundred-acre farnl, raising beef, pigs, chickens, grain and vegetables.1o The stated goal of the community was impossible: unconditional love for those whOln society had rejected. From a perspective of our faith, this was not simply a cOlnmand to be charitable but to seek grace, or the presence of God, amongst people who were the equivalent of Flannery O 'Connor's rural poor: the most marginalized people in society. They were not always easy to love and one quickly understood why they had been rejected by society. But if God was not there, amongst these people, then our faith was worth nothing. "The reader wants his grace wann and positive, not dark and disruptive," said O'Connor ("The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South"

862), but as she also remarked, "redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in

10 See Bill Clarke, SJ. Th e Face ofFri endship, Novalis, Toronto, 2004 (with foreword by Jean Vanier and letters by Louisa Blair). 165

the actual life we live .... There has been operating in our culture the secular belief that

there is no such cause" ("The Fiction Writer and His Country" 806).

This is how the predispositions that Bosco calls "obsession with the incarnation"

and the "sacramentality of reality" came to play a part in both my own fiction and in

O'Connor' s. The incarnation is God's becoming human, being born of a woman, living the

life of a Palestinian Jew, dying the death of a criminal. One of the consequences of God

becoming incarnate and showing that human reality is sacred is that Catholics are invited to

comlllit themselves to reality, however inconsistent, ugly, or unwelcome it may be, because

this is where God communicates him/herself. This self-communication of God is known as

grace (Rahner 6: 51). As a Catholic writer, then, my predisposition is to ask, where are the

edges of grace? Is it here? Even here? Ross Labrie says that aIl the best writers, Catholic or

not, have to "test their ideologies against experience" (Labrie 18) or, as O'Connor says,

they have to immerse themselves in "the violence between principle and fact" ("The

Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" 856).

A new emphasis on the incarnation and the sacramentality of con crete reality in

Catholic theology was partly a result of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Vatican II was the context of Illy becoming a Catholic and has infonned my faith. It occurred late in

O'Connor's life and in the middle of Graham Greene's. Many critics have labelled a11 his novels following The End of the AfJair (195]) as "post-Catholic," but Bosco takes issue with this position, pointing out that the changes in theological and ecclesiological emphasis that occurred with the Second Vatican Council were avidly followed by Greene.

Vatican II suggested that even the most secular and profane concerns of society were possible paths to the sacred; it stressed the hUInanity of Christ, communal justice over personal acts of charity; and the possibility that a11 forms ofhuman interaction can be 166

sacramental. It rejected the perception of human nature as a body-and-soul dualism 11 and placed new emphasis on the incarnation as the presence of the divine in human flesh. The church was newly defined not as the hierarchy but as the people of God; the Catholic church was no longer seen as the sole arbiter of salvation and the faithful were encouraged to dialogue with cultural and political worlds. Bosco notes that Greene's later works sÏlnply reflect that theological shift by focusing less on personal faith crises and more on political/moral crises (Bosco 22-3).

Alfred Sonnenfeld moums the Joss that Vatican II entailed, calling it "the Church's assimilation into modemity" and argues that it eliminated what gave Catholics the isolation and edge so vital for the creative imagination (Sonnenfeld, Crossroads viii), or perhaps what Webb would call endangered hyperbole, or "blessed excess." One cannot accuse

Flannery O'Connor oflacking a vital edge, but then she did not engage deeply with Vatican

II. However, as a practising Catholic among a fundamentalist Baptist majority in rural

Georgia, perhaps it was her regional and denominational isolation that helped to keep her edge sharpened. In my case, my isolation within a cultural, denominational and linguistic minority in Quebec among a Catholic majority whose faith more or less died with the advent of Vatican II provides abundant riches for the creative imagination. Vatican II itself is key to my ability to stay within the Catholic church, not because it satisfies my

"modemist longings" (Sonnenfeld, Crossroads viii) but because it expanded the church' s catholicity, refusing any boundaries to grace.

11 Dualisnl is the heresy (a belief that runs counter to orthodoxy) that good and evil are two equal and opposite powers and that the hunlan person is a battleground for these powers: the good part is the soul and the bad part is the body. Dualists argue that the material world is entirely evil, in contrast with the orthodox position that the creation of God is good, but flawed. The influence of Greek and Cartesian philosophies in Western Europe have perpetually telnpted Christianity in the direction of dualism. 167

Exploring and breaking down boundaries involves people and situations that are marginal and often violent in both my work and O'Connor' s. In "Nearer Than the Eye" we delve into the underworld of drugs and sex and look for grace there. In Wis e Blood we look for any sign of grace in the story of Hazel Motes. In O 'Connor's case, Preston Browning calls this her effort to recover the sense of the Holy, and that in such a process

"contemporary man might well become involved in a joumey through the radically profane" (Browning 72). It is a dangerous route, as O'Connor knew weIl. There are dragons on the road, and we risk being devoured. For moving away from comfort and complacency, whether it is religious, material or cultural, and inhabiting the margins, or the underworld, is not just a test of faith, it is a prerequisite for both redemption and good writing.

Theologically speaking, confrontation with the monster of our own limitations, our brokenness, demands SOllle kind ofresponse. Ifwe can accept this experience ofpoverty, we are on the road to the Father of Souls. If we refuse it, deny it, avoid it or blallle others for it, we have turned back. The road to grace is through the cross, not around it. Ifwe wish to move into literary language to discuss this further, we could say that the writer, tO"o ,-lllUSt confront these ignoble facets of human reality in order to move into an authentic voice. In literature, this experience of confronting the violent, the Inarginal or the ugly is often discussed in terms of the "grotesque."

Christian writers, wrote O'Connor, often have "the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable" ("The Fiction Writer and his Country" 805).

Wis e Blood is indeed populated by lnarginal and spiritually-deformed characters: the obsessive Enoch Emery who finds his apotheosis dressed in a gorilla costume, the fraudulent Asa Hawks, his sensualist daughter Sabbath Lily Hawks, the prostitute Leora

Watts, and Hazel Motes, a homeless religious fanatic who nlurders a rival prophet. Motes is 168

the tacitum and vindictive grandson of a tent-rival preacher. Haunted by ~is grandfather's

religion, which he describes as "a trick on niggers" (Wise Blood 43), Motes violently rejects

both this and his own belief, and establishes instead the "Church without Christ" in which

"the deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, the dumb don't talk, and the

dead stay that way" (Wise Blood 45), a grotesque reversaI of Jesus' response to John the

Baptist's question as to whether Jesus is indeed the Messiah. He preaches this gospel from

,the hood of his "rat-coloured" car, which is also where he lives, and finally blinds himself

with quicklime in perverse recognition of his guilt. He deliberately subjects himself to a

grotesque form of penitential suffering involving wearing shoes filled with rocks and

broken glass and wrapping barbed wire around his chest, described by his landlady as

"something that people have quit doing, like boiling in oil or being a saintl2 or walling up

cats" (Wise Blood 127). The reader may weIl ask which is more delnonic: his anti-Christ phase or his repentance?

The Oxford Dictionary ofLiterary Terms defines grotesque as "characterized by bizarre distortions, especiallyin the exaggerated or abnormal depiction of human features.,,13 The deformity of grotesque characters is often linked to their oversÏ1nplified or extrelne ideologies. But as a literary term the grotesque is more than a type of character, a set of thelnes or a kind of setting. It is rather, according to Michael Greene, "the

Inanifestation of a striking - often affronting - duality that is reflected both in the text and in the response it elicits ... [;] it jumbles the categories upon which logical and

12 . l· M Y Ita lCS.

13 "grotesque" Th e Oxford Dictionary ofLit eraI'}' Tenns. Chris Baldick, Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Université Laval. 4 September 2008

classificatory systems rely .. . [;] it momentarily suspends modes of comprehension and estranges its reader from the familiar world" (Greene 444).

There are two main lines of critical thought as to its purpose, the first originated by critic Wolfgang Kayser, who defined the grotesque as the power of evoking in audience or reader a sense of the radical alienness of the world, its "estrangement" from humanity and its essential absurdity, or "an awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which break up and shatter its coherence"

(Kayser 37). Grotesque literature, according to Kayser, is "an attempt to subdue the demonic aspects of the world" (184). Marshall Bruce Gentry points out that this wholly negative definition has led critics to see the grotesque in Flannery O'Connor as simply pointing to human corruption (Gentry 487). Martha Stephens, for example, is scandalized that human faces remind O'Connor of "rodents, cats, hogs, mandrills, and vegetables; they are frog-like, hawk-like, gap-toothed, mildewed, shale-textured, red-skinned, stupid, demented, and simply 'evil '" (Stephens, 9-10). Lewis Lawson sees this use of the grotesque as O'Connor's way ofpointing out the ' ~ deadly effect of Southern fundamentalisl11 ... on the soul, warping and terrorizing it so completely with its perversion of Christian doctrine that the soul in rebellion rejects entire1y the idea of orthodox Christianity" (Lawson 138).

In "Nearer Than the Eye" it is helpful to divide the grotesque into the characters (or

"grotesques") and the setting. The characters are not exc1usive1y grotesque, as O'Connor's are. However, Hormidas is grotesque in that he is both camally and eternally obsessed with bones, even with those of his lover Maude (Blair 97) who, years 1ater, ends up herself carrying the bones of the saints around in her pockets and conversing with them. She also speaks to the saints and sees angels around the city, behaviour that is grotesque in the eyes ofher fal11ily and of the resolutely secular society around her. However, while Maude's 170

Catholicism has the trappings of pre-Vatican II Quebec Catholicism, she has none of its

Jansenism,14 partly because of a lively and colourful prayerlife that is a defence against rigidity, and partly because of the ambivalence she still feels over her affair with Hormidas.

Rer Catholicism is thus a more harmless form of "extreme ideology" than the fundamentalism of O'Connor's self-styled prophets and, although she may be considered deformed by her extremism, her Catholic perspective is conveyed by a third-person limited- omniscient narrator, a perspective that is necessarily more empathetic than O'Connor's consistently third-person omniscient narrator. The grotesqueness of her character is rather in how she is seen by others. The more secular characters see church as ridiculous, relics as disgusting, and the eucharist as bizarre and cannibalistic (Blair 73). Most of aIl, it is this

"jumbling of categories" or "suspension of conventional modes of comprehension" that results from the switching of perspectives between Maude's metaphysical world and

Violet's secular, material world that can be descrjbed as grotesque.

In "Nearer Than the Eye" most of the characters are not overtly religious, and so in the antireligious society of modern secular Quebec they must, like O'Connor's characters, work out their salvation through the drama of their lives. As in her drama, blood and bones play an important role in this search, and whether her characters are entirely driven (like

Enoch and Hazel) or have real choices is still questionable. Does Violet have a choice about having an abortion, or is she simply obeying the voice in her head (Blair 82) which, like

Enoch' s, is "stocked up with aIl kinds of words and phrases" (Wise Blood 49)?

14 Jansenism was a Counter-Reformation bran ch ofCatholic thought, close to CaJvinism, that en1phasized original sin, human depravity, the necessity of divine grace, and predestination. It took a moralistic tone and conden1ned alJ laxity. 171

The physical drama of blood and bones, violence and death is ever present in the background of "Nearer Than the Eye." Quebec Catholicism was fascinated with the human physicality of Christ, his mother and the saints to the point of being almost grotesquely obsessed. There are numerous·religious orders named after the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is a popular devotion and is physically depicted in statues and paintings as a large red heart sitting on the outside of Christ's chest with blood spurting out of it. The village where Maude grew up, Precious Blood, is a real village near Joliette that was nalned after

Christ's blood. 15 Hormidas and his trade in the bones of saints is based on a real character in Quebec's religious history, Joseph-Calixte Marquis, who did import crate loads of relics from Europe and did set up a Tour des Martyrs to exhibit them at his parish of Saint-Pierre- de-Célestin. Many churches and monasteries in Quebec are still filled with bones, once framed and cheri shed and revered, now ignored and forgotten. The walls of the Chapelle du

Séminaire de Québec, for example, are covered in hundreds of relies in elaborate frames and settings, many of which were provided by Marquis. The chapel is now deconsecrated and is part of a museum, the Musée de l'Amérique française, which rents it out for candle- lit business parties. The relies on the walls are now label1ed for their anthropological interest.

IfO'Connor's culture promoted a grotesque form ofChristianity, the violent deaths of the Inartyrs and the devotion to their relies are examples of the grotesque that were promoted insistently in Quebec religious culture. The lives of Quebec's saints were full of strange struggles and visions. Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin (1632-1668), for example, believed herself each day to be inhabited by a precise number of demons, a fonn of torture to which she agreed in order to expiate the sins of New France. She noted their antics in her

15 The full name of th e village is Précieux-Sang-de-Notre-Seigneur-Jésus-Chrisl. 172

journal and described the bruises and cuts they had inflicted on her body. Elsewhere she describes various violent temptations: to eat lemons (a luxury in New France), to blaspheme against Jesus, to kill, to desire the damnation of mankind, and to commit suicide. She once wrote that she would rather be tortured and burned at the stake by the

Iroquois than be the Beloved of Christ. 16 Meanwhile, she slept wearing what can only be described as instruments of torture, and if she caught herself feeling any aversion to a sick patient, she would conspire to eat sorne of their infected phlegm to punish herself. Even the

Diocese of Quebec, in a contemporary interpretation ofher life, understood her to be psychologically disturbed, to the fury of the religious community to whom she belonged and who revere her relies to this day.

Another beloved Quebec saint, the Huron girl Kateri Tekakwitha, starved herself to death in 1680 in a gesture of self-mortification which today would be interpreted as terminal anorexia. The Jesuit martyrs were beheaded and their hearts eaten, facts which were celebrated and recounted to the smal1est child as examples of sacrificiallove. Yet while the behaviour of the Iroquois in devouring the hearts of the martyrs (in order to imbibe their bravery) is seen by a secular society as insanely grotesque, perhaps their Jesuit victims, and subsequently Catholic schoolchildren, understood the gesture quite weIl. It is after a11 a notion easily matched by Catholic eucharistic theology -- the wine and bread consumed at Mass is believed to be literally the body and blood of the Saviour; relies are believed to be the tangible presence of holiness. The sacralnent of the Eucharist may seem to be a grotesque [orm of cannibalism, as Beatrice points out in "Nearer Than the Eye," but to a Catholic sensibility it is the presence of the holy in the world, as the incarnation is seen as the divine ilnpregnation of the natural world. Thus the grotesque cornes entirely natura11y

See La Vie de Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin by Paul Rageneau, SJ.

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to Catholic writers, indeed is a necessary trope for handling the passage past the dragon to

grace and redemption.

Just as in my discussion of theology l suggested that whether a work is Catholic or

not depends not on the fiction itself, but the critic, perhaps the same is true of whether a

work is grotesque or not. It could be argued that the word is useful for atheist literary critics

as an epithet for fiction that takes the metaphysical seriously; but it may also be a

necessary tenn for discussing Catholic fiction without getting mired in theology. Any

language has its limitations when it cornes to discussing either art or faith - both have a

profound and inexpressible mystery at their heart - but perhaps two languages can come

nearer than one. Thus taking a brief look at the tradition of the grotesque within Canadian

fiction may be a useful exercise in analyzing the metaphysics of "Nearer than the Eye" and

situating it within a literary context.

Margaret Northey, in her discussion of the grotesque in Canadian literature (The

Haunted Wilderness: the Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction), bases her analysis on

Kayser's absurdist definition of grotesque but divides it into several rather cavalier subcategories. lin her view, The Double Hook by Sheila Watson is an example of the

"symbolic grotesque;" Marie-Claire Blais' Mad Shadows is the "terrible grotesque," and La

Guerre) Yes Sir! by Roch Carrier is the "sportive grotesque." Carrier's characters are described as grotesque in their "single-minded pursuit of outwom truths," surely a phrase she would apply to Maude, but also one that raises the question, what is an outworn truth?

Does tilne wear down truth?

Northey further categorizes Leonard Cohen 's Beautiful Lasers, which has perhaps

Inore in COmlTIOn with "Nearer Than the Eye" than the others, as "mythic grotesque."

Cohen 's story ofKateri Tekakwitha uses the grotesque to express a Inystical vision by 174

pushing "to the extreme edge in his dark night of the soul" and "seems to suggest that su ch extremes are prerequisites ofultimate beatitude" (Northey 101). In the novel, 'F"s advice to "fuck a saint" and his claim that there is no such thing as a dirty word or a dirty object is an attempt to overcome the dualism ofbody and soul and to counteract the Calvinist-

Jansenist repression of sexual pleasure (103). Cohen seems to be saying that "the grotesque does not indirectly point to the sublülle ... but it is the divine" (1 05).·Northey judges that

Cohen' s attempt at the "mystical grotesque" fails to lead us to the holy, leading instead to sado-masochistic extremism. In other words, Cohen does not deny the dragon but cannot seem to move past it, mistaking it for the Father of Souls. Looking at Canadian fiction up to

1976, Northey observes that mu ch of it insists on the presence of a mysterious evil that defies behaviourist or sociological explanations, "despite an abandonment of any explicit religious dimension, and occasionally despite the presence of anti-religious sentiment." She concludes that "for a number of Canadian writers, God may be dead but the devil lives on"

(109).

While èohen may identify the grotesque with the divine, in "Nearer Than the Eye" the grotesque neither defines or banishes the divine, which transcends it. Maude' s fondIing of the bones of de ad people may be grotesque, but it offers her a kind of intÏIllacy that is not to be despised, although ultÎ111ately her faith takes her beyond these trappings of old

Catholicism. Unlike Cohen' s interpretation of the life of Kateri Tekakwitha, the saints in

"Nearer Than the Eye" leave room for ambiguity; this is not hagiography noris it wholly satire. As for evil in "Nearer Than the Eye," it is ubiquitous but banal. Evil is most visible in the margins where material and/or cultural security and beautiful surroundings are unable to mask it. Evil, such as Maude's estrangelllent from her sister due to her affair with a priest, Violet's abortion and David's violentjealousy, is more ofa bu rd en that the 175

characters bear than a lTIalevolent presence and can only be traversed or absorbed by human

love, often painfullove. As O 'Connor said, "evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a

mystery to be endured" ("The Catholic Novelist in the South" 803). Maude' s mystical

visions of angels and her discussions with the relics are comforting in that they are

reminders of an eternal reality, and they are conlpanionable (and even mischievous)

presences, but they may beC01TIe a distraction from thereal work of love at hand, which is

more about suspending moral judgement and opening herself to the human suffering of her

daughter and sister.

While Maude does attempt this transition towards love, it seems O 'Connor' s

character Hazel Motes is so trapped in loveless fundanlentalist legalism that even after

blinding himself he must retum to his cruel childhood penances to atone for his sins. For

the reader of "Nearer Than the Eye," too, the saints and angels lTIay also be a diversion

fr01TI the real work at hand, or the realist direction of the novella.

Both books are comedy, however, not tragedy, and no discussion of evil and the

grotesque is sufficient. without taking this into account. Kayser' s understanding of the

purposes of the grotesque leaves out humour, which has always been an essential element

of the grotesque in its attempt to liberate the world from what is fearful or demonic. This

humour is necessary, not incidental. A black sense ofhumour was an essential aspect of

surviving my experience of walking into a world of criminality and lTIental illness; fiction

writers from Rabelais and Chaucer to Alexander Pope and Evelyn Waugh have always known about its healing and cathartic powers. As Pope wrote, "1 have known a man thoughtful, melancholy, and raving for divers days ... but forthwith grow wonderfully easy,

lightsome and cheerful upon a discharge of peccant humour in exceeding prurient meter"

(Pope 46). 176

Mikael Bakhtin's discussion of Rabelais challenges Kayser's hUlTIourless notion of the grotesque and sees grotesque folly as a prerequisite for fertility. The grotesque degrades the Ideal, he says, hurling it to "the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving" (Bakhtin 21). Like compost, it is the fertile ground from which new life springs. This concept is the divine paradox, and deeply theological. The folly of the Cross, as St. Paul says, is the prerequisite for the Resurrection and our salvation. Relies in "Nearer Than the Eye" are literally compost, and figuratively fertile ground for new life: the death of the saints adds to the communion of the departed who urge Maude to embrace life and love. In "Nearer Than the Eye," it is in the marginal people, such as Carmen, David, Yannick and Violet, notable for their weaknesses and excess, that lie the seeds of new life. They have not succumbed to conformity, which is death deprived of fertility.

Weakness and excess breed chaos, and in American Gargoyles: Flannery o 'Connor and the Medieval Grotesque, Anthony di Renzo observes that the grotesque,

"even more than comedy or satire ... glories in the uncategorical nature of existence" (Di

Renzo 7). He compares O'Connor's figures to gargoyles around a medieval cloister, "an

AlI F ools' Day of freaks, fanatics, rednecks, and crooks arranged in a writhing frieze," and tries to show that her peculiar cOllledy fits (or misfits) medieval religious fonTIs into a contemporary context:

Grotesque art ... expresses the repressed. For all their hideousness,

gargoyles serve a purpose: they provide drainage for a cathedral. They

are literally waterspouts whose grinning mouths spew sewage and 177

rainwater. The throaty, obscene laughter of the grotesque also opens the

sluice gates. It is a ferocious reassertion of a11 that a culture denies, an

outlet for those feelings, ideas, and images that it censors and banishes

to make life conform to a safe, predictable pattern. The grotesque is

transgressive. It crosses borders, ignores boundaries, and overspills

margins. Destructive and blasphemous, it plays havoc with our most

cherished ideals, grinds our sacred cows into hamburger." (5)

The sacred cows that are being ground into hamburger in Wise Blood and "Nearer

Than the Eye" are not religion, but its absence: devout materialism an~ a kind of fundamentalist secularism that homogenizes both beauty and ugliness, good and evil, banishing any but the most literaI meanings of sex, passion, blood, freedom, suffering and death. Philosopher Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age uses the term "excarnation," or "the steady disembodying of spiritual life, so that it is less and less calTied in deeply lTIeaningful bodily forms, and lies more and Inore 'in the head '" (771). One of the symptoms of excarnation is "the exaltation of disengaged reason." In this upside down world where the secular is sacred, the halTIburger-grinding tool in our fiction, ironically, lTIay take the fOrIn of religious extremiSlTI. Postnlodernist critics will surely approve of this

"irruption of otherness and strangeness" into culture and society, perhapsfor differentbut equally ideological reasons, but who are we to protest that for this brief historicallTIOment we have their attention?

The persistence of blood and bones in poking through into the secular world of

Quebec City in the 1990s in "Nearer Than the Eye" challenges this "exaltation of disengaged reason." Blood and bon es that are incarnated or imbued with metaphysical 178

importance are not only a form of the grotesque, however, and perhaps their presence is not

"degrading" enough, in Di Renzo' s terms, for the novella to fall cOIllfortably into the

grotesque genre. Ifone is to avoid retuming to theology in discussing both the relics and

the angels in the "Nearer Than the Eye," one is pitched squarely into the realm of the

marvellous, or of magic realism.

The Oxford Dictionary ofLit erary Terms defines nlagic realism as "a kind of

modem fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that

otherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of objective realistic report." The mOIllent in Garcia

Gabriel Marquez' One Hundred Years ofSolitud e when one character unexpectedly

ascends to heaven while hanging her washing on a line is often cited as a leading

17 exaIllple. Maude' s visions of angels as she walks down Côte du Palais (Blair 91) or her

conversations with the relics in her pocket (38) clearly fall into this category, as the rest of the story does read like a fairly reliable report.

"The marvellous" was defined by André Breton in his Manifesto of 1924 as an aesthetic category (Rosemont ] 21), while German art critic Franz Roh first coined the tenll

"magic realism" to speak of work inwhich "mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it" (Roh 16). Slel110n sees no difference between the two terms and claims that "in none of its applications to literature has the concept of magic realislll ever successfully differentiated between itself and neighbouring genres such as ... the marvel1ous" (Slel11on 9). Critic Anne Hegerfeldt disagrees. "Magic realism," she writes in Lies That Tell the Truth, "differs fundamentally from the nlarvellous in that the l11agic realist world purports to be a reflection of the reader's world, whereas

17 "magic realisnl," The Oxford Dictionary ofLiterary Terms. Chris BaJdick, Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Uni versité Laval. 4 September 2008. 179

marvellous literature makes clear from the beginning that the fictional world functions

according to completely different laws" (Hegerfeldt 80).

Again, with these literary definitions, one bumps up against the question of what the

critic believes, as of course no one, not even a critic, is likely to acknowledge the

fictionality of a mythology to which he or she subscribes without thereby cancelling hi s or

her subscription. Angels appear in the Bible, and the Bible does not acknowledge its own

fictionality. Does that n1ean it is magic realism? Hegerfeldt neatly avoids the question. The

Bible, she says, as well as Christian and Jewish mythology in general, "fumish magic

realist fiction with fantastic elements in the saIne manner as do Greek l11yths, Celtic

legends, or the Brothers Griml11 fairy tales" (81). Even Roh' s discussion of the l11ystery

which "does not descend to the represented world but hides and palpitates behind it" is

highly charged for anyone who subscribes to Christian l11ythology. Replace the word

"behind" with the word "within" and this definition could apply to the word "incarnation."

Richard Morse in writing about the Latin American identity observes that when

everyone believed in God and the devil, in magic and in the supernatural, the term magic

realism would not have had "today's oxymoronic connotations" (Morse 119). Alejo

Carpentier, who irritated critics elsewhere by insisting in 1967 that magic realism was an

exclusively Latin American phenol11enon, claimed that one needs faith to write

authentically about the Inarvellous:

The phenomenon of the marvellous presupposes faith. Those who do nqt

believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints ....

Certain phrases ofRutilio about l11en transformed into wolves from The

http://www.oxfordreference.C01n/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t56.e683

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Labours ofPersiles and Segismundo tum out to be prodigiously trustworthy

because in Cervantes' time, it was believed that people could suffer from

lupine mania. Even Luther saw a del110n face to face and threw a bookwell

at its head.

Carpentier has no time for poets or artists who dabble in magic realism "without being able

to conceive of a valid mysticism or to abandon the most banal habits in order to bet their

souls on the terrifying card of faith" (Carpentier 86).

Whether Carpentier is right or not, 1 would suggest it is no accident that the greatest

magic realists come from Catholic cultures that have stayed close enough to their animistic

roots or have had enough animistic influence, such as Amerindian or Celtic spiritual

influence, to prevent them from straying too far into the heresy of dualism, that peculiarly

western affliction in Christianity, or into Taylor's excarnation. Thus Britain 's historically

Protestant culture, withered dry by too much Enlightened reason, has not been fertile

ground for magic realisll1. In a letter to critic Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, British novelist John

Fowles confinl1ed this by confessing that the British dislike magic realists for moral and

puritanical reasons because nlagic realists "can have their cake and eat it - both bend

reality and be really serious" (Delbaere-Garant 252).

Catholic/animist outpost cultures, however, have no such probJelns having their

cake and eating it. This would apply to South America (Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One

Hundred Years ofSolitude) but also to Africa (such as Ben Okri's The Famished Road),

Ireland (Flann O'Brien 's At Swim-Two-Bird!J) and Quebec (Michel Trelnblay's La Grosse fen1me d)à côté est enceinte, Roch Carrier's Jardin de délices, Victor Lévy-Beaulieu's

Monsieur Melville, and Jacques Ferron's Les Roses Sauvages, for example). In the case of ------

181

Quebec, the animistic influence may come from a pre-Christian Breton underpinning to the

Catholicism of the early French settlers, as well as the influence of Huron and Iroquois spiritualities. In spite of Carpentier' s possessiveness, magic real ism has now beCOlTIe "the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world," according to Homi Bhabha (Bhabha

15). More recently, Wen-Ching Ouyang questions the theoretical usefulness of the term itself. He sees it as "invading and setting up colonies in the literary and visuallandscapes" everywhere, and that any resistance at aIl to modern western epistemology is now labelled magical realism (Wen-Ching Ouyang 15).

Whether using the magic realism label for a generalized resistance to western epistemology is useful or not, the label has been alluring enough to have seduced postcolonial critics such as Stanley McMullin, who sees magic realism as giving voice to those New World cultures that have been lTIarginalized by the Old World, or Europe. The marginalization began when Canada was first discovered by Europeans, and its territory and species were so strange (magic) that Europeans had to revise their systems of classification (realiSlTI) to include its new species (magic realism), literally writing them in the margins of existing taxonomies. If moose exist, after aIl, why not unicorns? In the country's very origins, then, the oXylTIOrOn is resolved, the cake may be both had and eaten.

Magic rea1islTI, writes McMullin, expresses the heartland-hinterland dichotomy, where the heartland "does not celebrate its distinctive regional existence, it celebrates its imperial identity" and is concerned with "lTIeaning, form and structure," while the hinterland, such as Canada, which came into being as a fish-and-fur repository for Europe, is "eccentric, experimental" (McMullin 21).

Thus Canada qualifies as a nursery for the cultivation of magic realiSlTI. Hegersfeld writes that Geoff Hancock, who first appropriated magic realism for British COIUlTIbia, did 182

so more because he believed it would lTIake Canada appear less dull to outsiders than for

any other reason (Hegersfeldt 13). But as early as the 1980s other critics were identifying

Canadian fiction, such as Robert Kroetch's What the Crow Said and Jack Hodgins' The

Invention of the World, as supreme examples of lTIagic realism and relating this to their

regionality or their hinterland status (McMullin 23). In the latter, a drunken farmer is

caught in a blizzard on his way home from the tavem, tries to mount an imaginary horse,

and is found frozen the next moming. In Canada, this interpenetration of the magic and the

real is no longer metaphorical but literaI, writes Delbaere-Garant, because of the violent

extremes of climate and landscape. The landscape is no longer passive but active -

invading, trapping, dragging away, etc. She uses the term "mythic realism" for countries

where there is still "unconsumed space," where lTIagic images are borrowed frOlTI the

physical environment instead of being projected from the characters' psyches (Dalbaere-

Garant 253).1 8

Quebec, a place thrice-colonized in its own right (once by France, once by Britain,

and stiJl rankling under the dominion of English Canada), provides fertile soil for the

growth of lTIagic realislTI as defined by the critics cited above. It is postcolonial hinterland

that is lTIarginalized by the Canadian lTIainstream, its culture is Catholic/animist, its clÎlTIate

is extrelTIe, and it offers "unconsumed space' ~ in abundance. As for angels or dead saints

being simply projections ofMaude's psyche, at any tÏ1TIe she is only a stone's throw away

, frOlTI the Monastère des Augustines, the Chapelle du Séminaire, or the Hôpital Général (in

18 Dalbaere-Garant also l11entions the New Zealand author Janet Frame (An Angel al My Table) as one among nlany hinterland authors who slip into the magic realist mode just at the point when they have something particularly significant to say, magic realism being, in Dalbaere-Garant's view, "a posttllodem equivalent to the epiphanic moments of the modenlists .... Their fiction remains strongly anchored in the real and the moral" (261). 183

the unamalgamated municipality ofNotre-Dame-des-Anges), where she can see any

number of representations of angels or framed relics adorning the wal1s. If she is psychotic

then so have been four centuries of Quebecers before her. But the moments of encounter

with angels and relics do not replace epiphanic moments; rather, they fulfil the function of

companions, witnesses, or perhaps the Greek chorus, looking on but not intervening in any

obvious way.

Jennifer Andrews, in writing about the Canadian context (Anne-Marle Macdonald's

FaU on Your Knees), writes that "magic realist writers typically presume that readers have

faith and believe in the existence of sorne klnd of spiritual plane" (Andrews 4). She calls

magic realism's "bending ofreality" a way for marginalized communities to contest a

version oftheir history imposed by the heartland:

Superstition is treated as part of daily life, and brings another dimension

to the narratives being relayed .... Contradictory versions of the same

event are made avaiJabJe and written records are revised to include folk

wisdom, prayers, and the firsthand experiences of those who have been

oppressed or silenced. Thus, magic realists contest the notion of history

as a linear and logical phenomenon froln a wide variety of perspectives

by including superstition, folklore, and the voices of otherwise

neglected nlelnbers of the population (3).

One of the major preconditions for magic realism, then, is marginalization, or estrangement from the mainstrealn. This is the situation of everyone in "Nearer Than the Eye." David and Carmen are particularly Inarginal and sometÎ1nes abusive people who disturb the fragile 184

stability of their families. Other key characters, such as Yannick, are adolescents who are living in the teenage world of the skateboard and drug cultures, both outside the mainstream. They inhabit the physically marginal areas of Quebec City that are not to be seen in the tourist brochures: skateboard parks, abandoned buildings (the National School), the psychiatric hospital, the bar in Lévis, and the river ferry - a liminal zone between

Quebec and Levis. The Lablanchet family also inhabit the marginal world between French and English, as they are among a tiny minority of Que~ecers who speak both languages as mother tongues, and thus only really share a culture with each other. They are a population on the verge of cultural and linguistic assimilation.

In tenns of marginality and hinterland, then, the tiny world of the Anglo-Franco teenagers oftoday's Quebec City are star candidates. And like all Quebeckers, they are now seeing their myths, folklore and oral traditions, inherited from the rich Catholic culture of the saints and a fertile source of the magic in magical realism, queasily relegated by modem

Quebec culture to the ethnohistorical reahn or else disappearing altogether in a cloud of embarrassnlent.

So what is the purpose ofthis lnarginality? Does it perform a literary, nostalgic, cultural, or rather existential function? Or have Canada's cultural policies even served to cultivate, amongst its writers, a self-conscious veneration of marginality for its own sake?

Mordecai RichIer is a Canadian author who uses magic realism but refuses to make literary capital out of the cultural marginality of his Jewish religious-ethnic heritage. He discusses lnarginality only to satirize it. In his essay on Mordecai Richler's magic realisln, Richard

Todd discusses Richler's satire of Canada's literary exploitation of culturallnarginality

(Todd 321). "What happens to one's identity when one accepts institutional subsidies to preserve that identity within. a Inulticultural cOlnmunity? Is to accept such subsidy an ___ o __ o ______~

185

affirmative gesture, or is it to permit oneself to become further marginalized and even ghettoized?" In Salomon Gursky Was Here, bootlegger Tim Callaghan says:

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding

tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French

Canadians consul11ed with self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled

the Duke of CUl11berland; Irish the fal11ine; and Jews the Black

Hundreds (RichIer 376).

According to Todd, Richler's characters can only create and perform their own historiographies by discarding Canada's "failed; drab myths," represented by the Gursky family (Todd 326). Cultural nlarginality in "Nearer Than the Eye" is not in the foreground; it ·is simply a reality with which the characters live. Perhaps the fact that Anglophones are in the paradoxical situation ofbeing a tiny and almost assimilated l11inority within a culture that regards the English language as a global menace is a safeguard against literary expressions of disgruntlement. Tom, for example, is embarassed on the bus when hi s mother speaks English to hinl, not because it l11arks thel11 as marginal but simply because she doesn 't realize that there nlight be people listening who can understand what she is saylng:

"Where are the l11ad people?" asked Tom.

"Here they are," she said, "they're right here."

What ifthey talk English? he thought. The mad people might not

like being called mad. His l110ther often made COlnments about people in ]86

fast English on the bus or in the street, assulning no one understood, and

it worried Tom. More people spoke fast English than she thought (Blair

117).

The marginalities are elsewhere, and their implications are existential rather than

related to cultural identity. Most of the characters are on the temporary and confusing

margins between childhood and adulthood, searching for their path in a world where

freedom is equated with a rejection of parental authority, or worse, indulgence in a

cOlnplacent form oftribalism. ln Chapter 3, for example, reference is made to Jeff Million,

the Quebec City "trash radio" host of the 1990s (Blair 35). The real-life model for this

fictional character developed a cult following who defended him against government

intervention with the slogan "Liberté, je crie ton nom partout," borrowed from French poet

Paul Éluard. Million 's grotesque interpretation offreedom appeared to be the liberty to

insult and persecute blacks, the handicapped and WOlnen , on air. It was a powerful choice

of words, as freedon1 is a word that historically carries deep theological and political

resonance in the cultural memory of Quebec. The word still inspires a spiritual and political

hunger in the young,19 but religious reference points have been expunged from the range of

serious choices as to how to achieve it. Maude, on the other hand, is lnarginal precisely in

her attachment of lnetaphysical lneaning to notions such as freedonl and passion. These are

Quebec' s "outworn truths."

ln "Nearer Than the Eye" this powerful religious past provides a rich "hinterland,"

whether we want to calI on it for the purposes of lnagic realism or not. ln O 'Connor's case,

19 Sotne of the ideas in this paragraph were inspired by the insights of Yorick Godin, a Quebec City ROll1 an Catholic and anarchist acti vitist (private conversations).

------187

the hinterland is eccentric precisely in its cultural Puritanism, which is taken to a fanatical and fantastical degree. But this, too, she knew would be distasteful to anyone with a stake in western epistemology, as the existence of a culture of believers is antithetical to the secular notion of cultural relativism. "When you create a character who believes in Christ, you have to explain his aberration," said O ' Connor, " ... here such people are taken for granted" ("The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" 857). So it is in Quebec - knowledge of Catholic saints and liturgy are as ingrained as the reading of the Bible was in

O 'Connor's south. It was perhaps not a conventional1iteracy but a liturgical and Biblical literacy. As O 'Connor says, "You don 't shake off [the influence of the old-time believers] in even several generations" (858).

Magic realism also cornes naturally to any writer who has been influenced by the

Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Written in 1541 , the Exercises are the basis of a particularly Jesuit form of incarnational theology: that God is to be found in aIl things, and that our lifelong goal is to discern that presence and action in any and every situation in our lives. The Exercises are undertaken in a thirty-day silent retreat in which one contemplates passages from the Gospels in relation to one's own life. The retreatant studies and prays over the passage and then enters into it, speaking with and interacting with the characters in the Gospel and letting the situation unfold as it will. The Spiritual Exercises thus lead to a personal relationship with Christ and the saints, e.g. , Mary, Joseph, and John the Baptist.

Such a relationship is reflected in the intimacy Maude has with the saints; thus Maude knows Mary not as the plaster statue with the blue cape but a tough little Palestinian Jewish wOlnan (Blair 78) or again as a Liverpudlian housewife (Blair 133). Violet and Maude' s reconciliation happens throughViolet's recounting of a dream, which Maude ponders with ]88

deep seriousness because St. Joseph 's most important decisions were based on his dreams

(Blair 79). As in magic realism, the supematural and the natural intermingle, and are each taken seriously.

The Spiritual Exercises are also a creative process that has parallels with the writing process. The retreatant's power of inlagination interacts with grace to become a way to approach God. Supervised by daily meetings with an experienced "spiritual director," the retreatant begins within the initial boundaries of the bare bones of a Gospel story, and, trusting that God is present in the imagination, proceeds with an exhilarating freedom. This is like the freedom of the writer, who runs with his or her imagination, within the boundaries of the basic characters, trusting that they will go somewhere and do something meaningful.

Respect for the human also lneans confronting the self; the writer is forced to observe her art and her deepest habits of thought as if from outside herself. The self s

Ï111age of itself is no longer final and whole and no longer coincides with a single, dominant voice. As Brinkmeyer says in reflecting on O'Connor's experience as a writer, "recognizing these other voices is the first step in actively integrating them" so that they are not "muffled into silence by a dominant voice but allowed their free expression" (Brinkmeyer 41).

However, as in prayer, this integration does not always happen. 1 found at titlles that my characters were stuck and could not seenl to act. l had to return to them again and again, trying a11 sorts of different angles and approaches, until they found their voices again. This experience, too, is parallel to the 19natian experience of prayer. Ignatius believed that the will of God is in fa ct our deepest desire and that only when we are authentic (not necessarily good, virtuous, or devout) will we know the will of God for us. The process of repeatedly retuming to an experience lived in contemplation gradually strips the retreatant

------189

of aIl the inauthenticities and of the images we wish to project, to others, to God, and to ourselves, of who we are. It is a process that contains a deep respect for the human and the natural.

Does this mean that if the Catholic novelist can integrate these voices, the message of the novel will somehow be Catholic? O'Connor is a Catholic and yet calls her novels realist because she confronts her vision of reality unflinchingly, as any non-Catholic writers must also do. She considers that any writer who believes, for example, that "actions are determined by psychic make-up or the economic situation or sorne other detemlinable factor" through "responsibility to the things he sees, ... may transcend the limitations of his narrow vision." (O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" 815). The complexity for the Catholic writer, she says, is "the presence of grace as it appears in nature" - and not separated froln it, or excamated.

The separation of nature from grace often takes the form either of sentÏlnentalism or obscenity. O' Connor cal1s the former "the distortion of sentiment in favour of innocence"

("The Church and the Fiction Writer" 809). Innocence, she argues, is not the ordinary human condition. It has to be rewon through our slow participation in Christ's death.

Sentimentality "is a skipping of this process in its con crete reality" (809). Sentinlentality by her definition would be crying about the extinction of polar bears as we drive our SUV s down the highway. Pornography, says O'Connor, is "essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purposes and so far disconnects it from its Ineaning in life as to make it sinlply an experience for its own sake" (809). In "Nearer Than the

Eye," Violet cornes to griefwhen she cotnes up against its "hard purposes." Maria speaks openly about the loss of children, as she COlnes from a traditional culture in which sex has not yet been partitioned off from children (Blair 110). Although Maude tries to discuss the 190

connection between sex and pregnancy with her own lover (a priest in the village of

Precious Blood), he ignores her and concentrates on a question he considers more

theological:

One day, as she picked up her skirt off hi s desk and he poured himself a

glass of sherry, she dared ask, "What if] have a baby? What must God

think of us?"

"We know what St. Paul thinks," he said, ignoring the first question

as ifit were not his dOlnain, "but do we know what God thinks? Maude

my child, you have no idea how Inuch l needed this. This is no ordinary

situation. My very bones cry out for yours" (Blair 98).

Anyone who sells relics for profit has already lost the connection between body and soui. ln

this sense Hormidas is the equivalent ofOnnie Jay Holy, who is Hazel Motes' rival in Wise

Blood, preaching the Church of Christ without Christ for money as the host of a radio show

called "Soulsease, a quarter hour ofMood, Melody and Mentality" for "the whole family"

(O'Connor, Wise Blood, 88). Unlike for Hazel, for Onnie Jay Holy the truth does not

Inatter, only religious self-assurance.

In "A Fondness for Supermarkets: Wise Blood and Consulner Culture," Jan Lance

Bacon writes that O'Connor's figures are victims of consumerisln, and that Wis e Blood is a searing indictlnent of religion as a form of saleslnanship. Thus Enoch has swalJowed the

Inyth of image, believing he can recreate hinlself through consumption (Bacon 27).

Marginal people, su ch as the people in "Nearer Than the Eye" who inhabit the skateboard culture, the drug underworld and the abortion c1inic or, at another extreme, the people who 191

speak to the bones of saints, are the gargoyles on the cathedral of conformity. In their

challenge to secular fundamentalism they also incarnate a social critique. They are the

hidden face of contemporary social and intellectual convention, the face that l11uSt be

hidden in order for consumer society to present itselfwith an acceptable self-image. Hence

the city is busy tearing down the St. Roch MaIl which, as a hang-out for the mentally ill and

for pregnant teenagers, has inconveniently exposed the face of the dispossessed.

Marginal people make others uncomfortable or even fearful, as their impJicit or

explicit disrespect for social control confronts everyone with the dragon, or what is

dangerous, doubtful or broken in thel11selves and each other. People's exclusion from

mainstream consumer society gives them a naturaJ proximity to authenticity. If advertising

is the witchcraft of our age, using words or images to cast spells on people so that they

desire one ilnage after another and try to emulate or possess instead ofto be, fiction writers

are drawn to people who are excluded from its influence, to the parts of people's li ves that

are excluded and, notably in the context of "Nearer Than the Eye," to places where it is conspicuously absent, such as the skateboard park, abandoned buildings, psychiatric hospitals and churches.

St. Cyril 's instruction to catechUlllens, frolll which the title ofthis essay is taken, was that we must a]] must pass by the dragon on our way to the Father of Souls, or on our way, as O'Connor says, to telling "stories of any depth" ("The Fiction Writer and His

Country" 806). If the danger of being devoured is not there, if faith and fact have not confronted one another, then the story is not worth telling. Try as they lnay to hide from the dragon, excluded people are continually in danger ofbeing devoured, exposed to the dangerous truth behind the ÎIllages, unvarnished humanity with its unreasonable and sometÎ111es disastrous longings, passions, cruelty, barbarity, creativity, joys and suffering. 192

This is the dragon that the complacent can see from a comfortable distance and choose not to pass by. At our human extremes, hell is only a step away, but so is grace. 193

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