Vandal Love Page 2

  But that she ever knew the touch of a man, there was little possibility. Jude would have cuffed the curé for looking sidelong, and if the curé never did, it was because Jude made impossible all sins except those cherished in her heart. Among the village youths, the few who’d dared mock her or who, sitting behind her in class, had dipped the sun-blond ends of her hair in the ink pot, had received a slight shy gaze and soon after a roadside walloping that left bruises the size of horseshoes. But those months that her pale beauty became apparent, any man who so much as tried to speak with her was at risk, and once, when a tourist stopped his car for directions, Jude pelted it with firewood. Even the few girls Isa-Marie had as friends stayed away, afraid of Jude, who, like some mythical being, watched over her constantly. Often he came upon her as she sat alone, face to the fleeting sunshine, and then she’d hear him and jump. Cold made the skin around her eyes swell as if she’d been crying. She looked at the ground when he was near. She kept to herself or lingered after Mass. At home she made a crèche, though the curé told her that the baby Jesus did not have stigmata and a crown of thorns, that the animals in the manger didn’t need halos.

  The dry summer had passed, lilac and fireweed and the few wild roses withering in the headlands beyond the fields. Jude watched, drab clothes ghosted against dirt, an animal poised. On an October morning, as he went to cut kindling by the water pump, one of Isa-Marie’s schoolmates was waiting on the road to Mass. The boy had rim glasses like those of the monseigneur and had once been praised by the schoolteacher for composing a sonnet on the life of St. Francis. He was holding a roll of paper bound in silk ribbon, which he extended when Isa-Marie stopped before him. He’d just begun to speak as Jude came down the hill through the trees with the thrashing of a bull elk. Without pause or warning, Jude leapt the embankment and carried the boy to the outhouse, where he kicked back the board and shoved his head into the rudiments and slime.

  That evening, a brief, cold rain fell, and in sunset’s last silvery light, small pools shone as if the flat rocks of the coast had been strewn with mirrors. Isa-Marie had turned back on the road and skipped Mass. She’d gone home and into her room and hadn’t so much as glanced at Jude when he came in to mug about. She lay in her bed, turned away. He sat and shrugged and cracked his swollen knuckles, his glazed, red face blinking widely, often, as if to communicate feeling. Finally, he went outside and stood in the windy dark. The tide scraped the coast, and between a few isolated clouds a comet sketched a slow, bright flare. He stayed there until dawn lit the gradual contours of the eastern mountains.

  Isa didn’t leave her bed the next day. At first no one noticed that she hadn’t gone to school, but when, two days later, she remained curled in her blankets, the aunts began to murmur. Jude felt Hervé Hervé watching him. Winter was coming on hard, and Isa-Marie had always found the cold difficult. Dawns, when ice flowers sprouted from the stomped and rutted mud of the road, Jude returned inside and went into her room. She wouldn’t look at him. She lay on the bed, breathing shallowly, turned to the window. What sunlight filtered through the dirty glass made her skin appear translucent, bluish veins in her temples and throat.

  Now, as he did his chores, for the first time he dimly sensed all that he didn’t understand. Because of his and Isa-Marie’s silence or because she’d been born in his arms and their hearts had beat together so long, he’d assumed to know her mind. But perhaps she’d been in love, the moments before he came crashing onto the road the happiest of her life. He worked in a frenzy, feeding animals and mucking the barn, heaps of manure steaming in the pasture. A dry, crystalline snow fell and puffed about his feet. He gazed up at her window. He tried to understand her heart, to know what would make her better. He closed his eyes and saw sunshine. He saw the cup of the world spreading like a flower with dawn, wide and brilliant beneath the sun, then wilting into a fragrant dark.

  The tourists were fleeing winter, their long cars passing along the road in convoys. Days shortened, the sky a cramped, closed space, low and grey, and in the gradual darkness the coast became a rim of ash. Only a few lingered with cameras and tripods, parking in the weeds and hiking onto rises to click shots of the sea, the turning leaves, the rough, exposed shape of the land. Jude watched them, these often thin, dapper men who wore their pants tight at the waist like skirts, and others, longhaired, sporting dainty glasses with coloured lenses. They ventured into his field, stumbling on the furrows, watching the swift, automatic motion of his digging as he brought up potatoes from cold, clean dirt. He considered them violently, twisting the shovel deeper.

  Though it was hardly possible not to overhear stories of the U.S., Jude had never seen any point in joining the speculation. Talk of fine pay and cheap, easy living meant nothing to him. Maybe, for some, the stony earth and brief summers were not enough, but he’d wanted little else. Only now, for the first time, he wondered who the tourists were, where they came from, what they knew. His father had been one, and his mother had gone south, and so perhaps, he considered, they were his people, too.

  When he returned to the house, the aunts had just arrived, quiet now. Isa-Marie’s soft, persistent coughing came from upstairs. She’d always been sensitive to the chill—frileuse, the aunts had called her, la frileuse. She hadn’t left her bed or eaten in days. Afraid to wake her, he listened from outside her room. The few times he’d gone in just to hear her breathe he’d stepped softly, opened or closed the door as quietly as he’d been able. Hearing her cough, he felt as if he was struggling against something invisible, suffocating and blinding, like a blanket over his face. He wanted to know what he could do, who to fight.

  From the unlit hallway he listened to his aunts.

  C’est triste. But she would never have married. It was only a matter of time.

  Oui, it’s sad. She should have gone to the convent.

  Yes, the convent—she’d have made a good nun.

  It is sad. Tellement triste. Elle était si jolie.

  Jude stumbled outside. A grey sun settled faintly against a distant, watery horizon. Far off, the church’s spire was a frail ensign between sea and mountains. The cold mustered about him.

  At the docks he found Hervé Hervé. He asked what they should do —rare words, stumbling, Qu’est-ce … qu’on devrait faire? Hervé Hervé had been drinking. He’d just tied down the weir and put up the boats. He stopped and took in Jude with his single eye.

  There’s no point, he said against the windy silence. They die. People die. To call a doctor would be a waste of money. You can’t change anything.

  In the darkening chill Jude rushed against this rage. He went to the woodpile and grabbed the axe and swung. He split savagely, driving aimless, glancing blows until the handle splintered. He crouched, panting. Not knowing how to cry, he could only groan. Stiffly, he walked to the outhouse. It was set back in the trees. He opened the door and knelt as his grandmother had taught him in church years ago. He lifted the board. Without closing his eyes, he pushed his head inside, down through the thin layer of ice.

  The emigration to the factory towns of New England had begun after the rebellions of 1837 and 1838, and increased to a furor by 1880, the year of Hervé Hervé’s birth. As a boy, he’d watched for wagons in the grey light, the huddled travellers with collars pulled to their ears. He and his father had sworn never to give up these lands. Their hatred of those who left was perhaps their only point of agreement with the curé. Several times each month, sermons described emigrants as lazy and self-centred. They were weakening the Church’s divine mission in North America. They were corrupted by the desires of their wives for luxury. Aux États they would lose faith and language. Understandably the first French-Canadians had gone because of politics, for the lack of farmland and opportunity. But leaving the northern winter needed few reasons and had many: stories of the south, of busy sunlit streets and booming factories, the clear proof of wealth that returned in the form of men with store-bought suits and golden pocket watches. At the turn of the century,
an article in the paper said that there were ten cities in New England with populations of more than ten thousand French whereas in Québec itself there were only five. Across the border relatives had the wonders of running water, electricity and a steady pay-cheque. Even priests began to go, impressed by the wealth of the new parishes, realizing God’s work could be done elsewhere. The Sunday message changed: les canadiens would spread the true faith. Doctors and lawyers closed shop and headed south to open new ones. But for those who stayed, the choice was as real as the land’s settlement, as if they were founding daily their homes on a desolate coast.

  A century of the same event is long enough for men to think that it is part of the natural order of things. So when the laws changed in les États, the end of the emigration and the closing of the border seemed strange to all—cataclysmic. Those who returned home to visit spoke of the Great Depression, a few families even moving back. It was only during the Second War that the myth of the south, not easily forgotten, was resuscitated.

  Among the long-time tenants at the village boarding house was a man named Honoré, who, though very old in appearance, was one of Hervé Hervé’s sons from the first marriage. Hervé Hervé never spoke of him but the story was familiar, dating back to before the Normandy invasions. The war hadn’t been popular. The people of Québec felt no allegiance to England and hadn’t the leisure to pity France. Still, there were the few hearts too big for village life, and Honoré, with his praise and war rhetoric, was soon called l’Americain. Troops were then being shipped west for war in the Pacific, and after telling the village how everything would someday be American, how they would all look like summer tourists with quiet cars and blond wives, Honoré packed his bags. Though Jude had never cared for stories, this one had been told too often for him not to know—how Hervé Hervé caught the young man on the way to the recruitment office and beat him with a broken shovel handle. Another son had just died in Dieppe and Hervé Hervé believed he was saving Honoré. But not a month later the boy, almost fully mended, left in the night, enlisted and rode off with a few plucked-looking fishermen to catch the train west.

  As Honoré would later tell it, when the French-Canadian soldiers crossed through the Prairie provinces, the locals jeered. He’d learned that French-Canadian anti-war sentiment had roused anger from seaboard to seaboard. The Rockies hung colourless in moonlight. The train climbed, and before dawn, descended again, pausing at an empty station only hours from Vancouver. He hesitated, then left his wagon and kept on down the road.

  Eventually he found a ride to the border with a truck of Polish immigrants. He crossed south on foot and enlisted again, this time as an American, and was shipped off, not to the Pacific but to the high deserts of New Mexico. He was sure a mistake had been made. His platoon marched and camped in the desert. They dug trenches and smoked cigarettes, and because of his nascent English, he couldn’t ask questions. At night, the skyline lurid with bombs, he thought that perhaps the Mexicans had joined cause with the Japanese and Germans and soon would be streaming over the border in swastikaed sombreros and Hitler moustaches. Then one afternoon a detonation shook the earth. He’d been crouching, studying English with a rumpled Superman comic, and he looked up to see a light as dazzling and penetrating and white as what the curé had described as the seat of Jesus. He held his hand to his eyes and saw its fragile bones.

  The summer after Honoré left, an old man shuffled into the village in too-large military boots, sweating terribly. He was stooped, bald and toothless, and the story he told was of a great detonation, how afterwards he’d marched back to camp and removed his helmet to find his hair glued inside. He thought perhaps this was from the sun heating the metal, but that evening his teeth started to go. He shook and sweated, hardly able to stand. When this passed a week later, he was discharged and given a ticket home. He still sweated, terribly and for no particular reason. Hervé Hervé refused to have him around, and so Honoré took a room in the village. He spent his days on the stoop, proving with time to be a formidable storyteller and brewer of potato alcohol.

  After his return, many decided the U.S. was a terrible place, but this conviction didn’t last. Somehow, looking at Honoré, folded and watery-eyed on the porch, they found themselves saying not is terrible but used to be terrible. It seemed, because of his great age, that the war and its struggles had been long ago. In fact Honoré had a regular audience and took up the role, dressing in a suit of old man’s clothes, his mouth gummy and distracted.

  On the evening that Jude went to the village boarding house, he found Honoré sitting in the parlour next to the stove, shivering and sweating at once, red pouches beneath his eyes.

  C’est quoi alors … ces États? Jude asked. The old man squinched up his face and smiled. What is les States? he said with laughing gums. That is a big question, hein, mon gars?

  Jude, who’d never looked at a map longer than it took him to realize it wasn’t a picture, had no notion of a distance not lived in. He struggled to make sense of Honoré’s words, a strange war, deserts and crumbling red stone and plants with needles instead of leaves and snakes that played music with their tails. This human skeleton spoke on with toothless exaggeration, pausing only to slurp from his Mason jar. He described an elusive enemy, weapons that didn’t kill but that aged you. New Mexico was a bad place, he said, too big and dusty. The good ones are California, Connecticut and New Jersey, and especially New York. He described a world of wealth and sunshine and nice cars, women with luminous hair, the absence of illness. He talked about the thousands who’d gone and who were no longer farmers but rich men with golden knickknacks. Jude nodded, understanding at last.

  As he returned home, he realized that it made sense why his mother and most of his family had gone to les States. Emotion jerked in his belly like a big fish on a line. His aunts were right. Isa-Marie had not been born for this country. She wasn’t a woman who would bear eighteen lineages. Few were. That was why so many had fled, though Isa-Marie would never have the strength or courage. Thinking of everything he’d heard, he wondered if there would be a place for him and Isa-Marie in the magical south. And if he followed in the footsteps of the thousands who’d left, what would he become? What of these mountains and sea? Villagers said that when you crossed the border, you were never the same. Sons who returned were strangers at tables. But he’d had enough whining and moaning, American riches, French-Canadian woes, poverty and exploitation. Enough of a people whose wisdom came from suffering. Winter had set in, the high autumn tides long passed, and the only solution was sunlight.

  When he arrived at the farm, he didn’t go inside. He climbed the mountain path, the wind flapping at his open jacket. In the potato fields he stopped. A few unharvested furrows remained, and he began to work though the sun was setting. By the time he’d raked the last potatoes from the chill earth, clouds had gathered in immense reefs above the gulf, black patches against a reddening horizon. The festooned cables hung between electrical towers like broad stitches. He stood against the wind’s gravity as the hard earth tilted about him and the first stars flickered coldly. He stayed there, perfectly still.

  Just before dawn Hervé Hervé woke to the honking of geese high above. For a moment he thought it was spring, that yarrow had grown up outside the window, but it was only flurries that had fallen, catching in the dead tufts of flowerheads, lit by a setting moon. He lay in bed, listening to the thrumming of the refrigerator motor downstairs until it clicked off. He felt the stillness of the house. Oddly his thoughts wandered back against the years, the way he’d culled his children, building his family like everything else, and the runts who’d died, whom he’d known would die, the exigencies of the land simply too great a law. He’d looked in on Isa-Marie occasionally, with no strong emotion. She’d hardly been able to open her eyes. Returning home drunk one night, he’d seen Jude walking the road in his underwear, asleep, mumbling, his bare feet gleaming against the packed and frozen earth. Whatever strange motherless, fatherless bond the tw
ins had shared was too much. They’d both been idiots, one gentle, the other brutal, and while Isa-Marie had inherited something of Jude’s strength, it now seemed the opposite, Jude’s love no less an infirmity.

  Hervé Hervé lay a while longer, remembering and hoping that he was wrong. The previous night, he’d gone into her room. He’d pulled back the sheet and seen that she was dead. He’d been about to leave, but something had touched him, pity for Jude perhaps. He’d drawn the blind.

  Hervé Hervé listened. He was certain. Where would Jude take her? How far could he go? Hervé Hervé pushed back the covers and got up and dressed. He went downstairs and out to the barn. He broke the ice lids on the water buckets, then stood, watching the road. Perhaps he was the last thing his countrymen who’d left had seen or would remember, a large angry man staring with his one eye, waiting as they passed. For years he’d hated them, but he hadn’t known how much it was possible to lose—not just his family but the power of pride and love and the easy law of violence. He couldn’t imagine his children elsewhere or other than what they were. Did they carry with them something of this world, its land and sea? In the first dim emanation of that December morning, everyone he’d loved vanished along the road. They never ceased, constantly moving and vanishing against a grey light. The St. Lawrence thrummed the boulders of the coast, the wind as steady as gravity. He pictured those he’d lost as wood set into a fire, the south a country of ash, a land of ghosts.

  Québec-Georgia

  1961

  The people of Gaspésie were a mix of Acadian, Normand and Channel Islander, Jersey or Guernsey, Irish and Indian and Scot, and though Loyalists had been there since the American Revolution, they set themselves apart. But the Hervé family could be traced back to Brittany, to a mute who’d given the strength of his blood and the name of a Breton saint. He’d somehow ended up in Québec when the cod industry was building towns for seasonal work. Stories had it that he’d never made a sound. A wise woman had rubbed his tongue with elder sap, put hot ashes in his palms, hung his baby teeth on the neck of a yearling goat and run it into the sea, but to no end—as a newborn he didn’t cry or cluck, and as a man he lifted stones, received wounds and made love without a grunt. Why he should have been content to leave the banked homesteads of Brittany, his ancestors would never know.