Life in the Court of Matane (18 page)

I boarded the school bus in the morning to the amused looks of the other children. Curiously enough, becoming the leading egg producer on Route 4 had done nothing to boost my popularity. When I walked by with the perplexed expression of an anxious zoo keeper, I'm sure I heard them cackle like hens just to tease me. The Desrosiers brothers were the worst. For years, they'd endured the taunts of the other kids because they didn't have a telephone at home. In 1982. By choice. Anyone looking to communicate with them had to go over there and knock on their door. As was often the case for the police, according to a reliable source.

My new farming pursuits left me tired for school, where unusual things began to happen. Outside in the yard, groups formed according to the strangest criteria. Most of the time, the strongest boys and girls, no matter which grade they were in, would surround a kid and give them a hard time. The victim was not chosen at random. First off, they had to make sure the parents of the child they were going to bully didn't work for the school or the school board. Little Jean Beaulieu was thus spared, since his mom, who held a teaching certificate, regularly came in to substitute for teachers who called in sick. The girls who hung out with Julie Santerre were also spared; that went without saying. And, of course, these pogroms also spared anyone who had an older brother or sister capable of inflicting painful reprisals on the bullies. I often managed to hide in a corner or demeaned myself sufficiently to claim I belonged to Julie Santerre's group. As soon as I lowered my guard, a circle would form around me. At that particular instant, not unlike crows or starlings, threatening heads would spout forth cries of persecution that reminded me of the sounds the damned hear on their way through the gates of hell. Whenever I tried to break my way out of this hellish enclosure, I would be shoved back into the middle and the insults would fly. They tended to be unsubtle comments about my lisp, report card, or—there was that word again— faggots. I should never have let on that I enjoyed reading so much. On these occasions, I would sometimes think back to the Sermon on the Mount and Sister Jeannette. Her memory brought comfort to me, though it never managed to break the senseless chain that had me surrounded. Happily, every other day another boy would take over at the bottom of the pecking order. His name was Étienne. He was an only child, and rumour had it that he played with lacy dolls at home. I found this regrettable, but not to the point of burying his face in the mud, which happened to him regularly. It was thanks to him, I think, that I worked out that “faggot” didn't mean “a keen reader” because Étienne was such a bad reader he failed grade six. But that hadn't kept him out of the sights of the Desrosiers brothers and the other boys. Whatever they meant by the word “faggot,” I didn't want to be one. Not even for the Kingdom of Heaven.

One night when I was struggling to lift the hundred- pound bar with all my might, the king provided a few clarifications about faggots. A man in Saint-Ulric had left his wife and children, he said, because he was now a “faggot” and had gone off to live with another “faggot.” I imagined they both worked in a library or collected dolls. One day—I don't recall why—the man in question came to our house. I think he'd been talking to the police; someone had stolen something from him. He had come to give the king a document. I was out on the main porch, in front of the dahlias. He was in a car with another equally well-coiffed man. They were smiling and seemed very happy. He waved at me before they drove off. Two men in a car, smiling together on a sunny country road. For a long time, I thought that's what being a faggot meant. It didn't seem all that bad.

The king explained to me that faggots were mentally ill and didn't want anything to do with women. Jacques Brel was therefore not a faggot, even though women seemed to turn him down a lot. Since it involved abandoning wife and children, I wondered if the king might be a faggot. But that didn't make any sense. Far from turning women down, he seemed to want to say yes to all of them. None of this was of any use to me in the schoolyard. One day, I made an amateurish mistake. I was hiding behind a wall. My usual tormenters appeared from nowhere. It was a classic clobbering, now that I think about it. In full accordance with best practices. A number of neutral observers witnessed the scene and decided to have a word with Madame Nordet after recess. She looked exasperated. She quietened everyone down and said, “You're all going to have to acknowledge your wrongs and forgive each other for being so horrible. That's what Jesus would have done. Eric, we'll start with you.” And I had to tell my tormenters I was sorry. I asked them to forgive me for being at the foot of a wall that clearly belonged to them.

One morning in June, I found Julie Santerre surrounded by her friends. They had laid enormous eggs and were waiting there in silence without pecking each other. It was very strange. Something was up. The smell of calamity hung in the air, along with the usual henhouse stench. One of the young chicks lay dead in the corner, covered in blood and pecked all over. The eleven young chicks who remained were huddled on top of each other, trembling in one corner of the henhouse. The beaks of the adult hens were still stained with blood. There had been carnage. The clucks from the murderers chilled the blood in my veins. I gave the poor martyred chick a Christian burial. The king, always a valuable source of advice on such matters, decided that a protective fence was to be added to the henhouse, at least until the chicks were big enough to defend themselves. This was done. In their avian ghetto, what they gained in safety they lost in freedom.

Segregation is not limited to humankind.

Julie Santerre went on clucking and laying eggs, sometimes rubbing up against my leg as I emptied the nest box. It felt good to kick her away. She would go off to peck Brigitte or Nathalie or one of the other hens. It was at that moment, in June, that I lost all affection for my hens. I think they could feel it because the shells on the eggs they laid grew harder and harder. School was over. I thanked God. It was Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Quebec's national holiday, a day that also marked the start of the shrimp festival. Along with demolition derbies, the festival was the society event of the year in Matane.

It's thanks to the Northern shrimp that the rest of the province of Quebec has heard of Matane at all. A local revealing his place of birth to the suburbanites of Montreal will often be met with a stream of idiocy. “Aha! Shrimp. Ha! Ha! Ha! Hello there, Shrimp! Ha! Ha!” (To any readers tempted to read this exchange out loud, the laugh must be
completely
inane.) To which the man from Matane would love to reply, “Shut your face!” but instead comes up with an off-the-cuff response that is witty and courteous in equal measure, “That explains my rosy complexion, I guess…” He knows it's futile to point out that the shrimp in question come not from Matane but from Quebec's Lower North Shore, and that their only tie to Matane is a seafood-processing plant down by the port. The shrimp festival was thus not a celebration of the birthplace of shrimp, but rather of the place where they held their breath, were steamed alive, and were then shelled between a factory worker's fingers. So, in June, as soon as school let out, Matane would dance with shrimp. Literally. A mascot named Claw roamed the town's streets, pinching passersby. Do shrimp even have claws? A fact little known to festivalgoers is that the Northern shrimp (
Pandalus borealis
) is protandrous. This means that it's a hermaphrodite and that its male organs develop and become functional before its female organs. It reproduces and then goes through a short transition period before spending the rest of its life as a female. We usually eat shrimp when they're female. With cocktail sauce.

The festival organizers came up with a little song that I must confess I still know by heart. We were taught it at school. A little ditty about how welcoming Mataners are, one big happy family that likes to drink and dance and eat shrimp. Don't laugh, it doesn't sound any better in French.

Now, everyone knows you can't have a festival without a parade. St. John the Baptist had fallen out of favour, thanked for his loyal service to the people of French Canada. Which meant that the annual parade in his honour had been cancelled. His absence left a gaping hole in the list of rituals that punctuated life in our town by the water. To fill this yawning void, the town authorities had organized the festival parade. Truth be told, they made only slight changes to the old Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade. Neither the route nor the crowds that turned out to see it changed. Now, at this point in my story, it's vital that a brief explanation of the organizing committee behind the Matane shrimp festival be given. The shrimp festival had been co-founded by Benoît Bouffard in the 1960s. Benoît Bouffard was a descendant of the six Bouffard brothers who married six sisters from the Durette family a century earlier. One set of siblings coming together with another. Hence, no doubt, the festival slogan—“Say hi to the family!”—and the line in the theme song, “We're all family here.” The committee democratically elected the festival chairman, or chairwoman, every year. This individual's name and photograph were then published in
La Voix gaspésienne
, making them famous overnight. It was, after the town council, one of the most prominent offices in town and a gateway to celebrity. The post was so important that the chair almost never went uncontested. Elections were held in due form, with all kinds of conspiracies and machinations employed to secure the ultimate post. Sometimes I wondered if, as an adult, I would be made of the right stuff to one day chair the Matane shrimp festival. I had my doubts. But since I left Matane long ago, the question is now moot. The festival committee invited the whole “family” to come watch the parade from either side of Rue Saint-Jérôme. In the event of bad weather, the event would be held the following evening instead. Normally empty sidewalks bustled with people from all over, from neighbouring parishes, Rimouski, the Matapedia Valley, and even visitors from Quebec City and Montreal as they began their tour of the Gaspé Peninsula. By seven o'clock in the evening, a crowd was already waiting patiently outside the Dalfen and Continental, two department store chains where you could buy made-in-China nail varnish, toothbrushes, and polyester underwear, all at bargain basement prices. Faces turned pink in the wind waiting for the ceremonies to begin. The municipal police had closed the street for the occasion. We were there because it was the place to be. Right there by the bridge over the Matane River, where a handful of salmon fishermen were still sloshing around in the rapids. The clamour of the crowd suddenly reached us. We applauded the first group of majorettes wearing microscopic skirts, twirling their wooden batons in the northerly skies. Divisions of army, sea, and reserve cadets then followed, all in neatly pressed uniforms. There were also frightening clowns who tried to draw laughs from the crowd with their improvised tomfoolery. Among them, the famous Tit-Pit Leduc, lantern in hand, put in his annual appearance. Tit-Pit Leduc was always dressed up as a bum and I often confused him with Sol the clown, whose record I had at home. Julie Santerre's figure-skating team performed—to the great delight of all the older gentlemen—a few charming pirouettes. The crowd was jubilant. Carnival floats! Yes! In downtown Matane! Floats! The Optimist Club. The Knights of Columbus. The Daughters of Isabella. The Women Farmers. All of them waving to the crowd. It was possible to deduce, with a bit of simple arithmetic, that everyone who lived in Matane was either in the parade or on one of the sidewalks on either side of the road. In the distance, we could make out the little tower on the armoury, the words
POST OFFICE
engraved on it for all eternity, despite the fact that no one in Matane spoke English. The Bouffard dealership paraded huge American cars that people caught on camera, Instamatics at the ready. Flash bulbs. The excitement built. From the top of the street, applause and cheers went up, announcing the highlight of the evening. Yes! There it was! The shrimp was back for another year. It was at least ten metres long and two metres high. Lying on its back and smiling to the crowd, its casual pose signifying that good times had come to Matane. On either side of its body, four long pink legs fluttered in the breeze. Its broad smile and fleshy lips offered the promise of salty kisses. Its big wide eyes were as blue as the sea. The crowd roared with delight as it passed by. Ecstatic children followed in its wake. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” But we didn't care about the Ten Commandments. It was time to party! Dance, Gaspé, dance! Dance until your arthritis or your cirrhosis forces you to sit back down again! Dance before your youth ups and leaves on you! Dance before winter comes back! Slowly, the monstrous crustacean brought the parade to an end. Shrimp were then served to the festivalgoers in glasses and eaten from the end of a toothpick. A voice wished everyone a wonderful festival and they all headed home.

Aside from that, the shrimp festival didn't mean much to my sister and me. Most of the activities were held at night, boozy affairs at the “Lumberjack Camp” or one of the local bars.
Proudly and generously sponsored by Labatt Breweries.
Even though the voice of Jacques Brel was nowhere to be heard, the king was a big fan of the shrimp festival. Empty bottles littered the festival site every morning. People staggered home. Drink to the tune of a rigadoon!

Summer took on the shape of an egg. The hens laid furiously. I kept on pumping iron in the basement. I still hadn't knocked anyone's teeth out. A few eggs ended up transformed into muscle. For two weeks, the poultry farm almost broke even. Sometimes my leg squats hurt the cod scales that continued to grow behind my knees. As I crouched down, I could feel a slight tearing of the skin, right where the scales shone brightly. They were on my elbows, too. In other parts of the world, my scaly secret would have been common knowledge, but it continued to go unnoticed here in the north, where we had to cover ourselves up, even in July. I stayed strong in the face of distraction. Poultry farming. Reading. Body building.