Life in the Court of Matane (19 page)

Then came September 1982.

There was a new boy in my class at school. He was older than everyone because he'd flunked a couple of grades. He also wore a black leather jacket. He looked toxic from a distance. His arrival completely upset the pecking order. He was now at the top. His name was Jimmy Côté, and he didn't have much of a sense of humour. Rumour had it he'd done time for petty theft. He came from a family that could boast it always had at least one member behind bars. The king knew them well. It was the king who warned me about the boy one day. I wasn't to go near him. Jimmy Côté would spend only one year at school in Saint-Ulric, even though I seem to remember him being there forever. From the very first class, Mr. Ferguson, a rather strange teacher, spelled it out for him. “You don't call the shots here. Do I make myself clear?” Mr. Ferguson wasn't one to mince his words.

Back then, if there was one thing I feared more than nuclear war, it was finding myself alone with Mr. Ferguson. He taught English, phys ed, and ecology. He would often tell us terrifying stories about his experiences with parapsychology. Because Mr. Ferguson was one of Saint-Ulric's mystical figures, and very much into spiritualism and dowsing. Sometimes he would interrupt English class to tell us he was talking to dead people or capable of astral travel. He could, in other words, leave his body whenever he pleased and float through the air like a ghost to keep an eye on what others were doing from a distance; a little like God, but a member of the teachers' union all the same. I envied Mr. Ferguson's ability to leave behind a place he didn't like, if only in spirit. I kept looking until I found a guide to astral travel in the library. Readers were warned of possible dangers—the practice could sometimes lead to madness—but I was willing to take the risk. It involved, if I remember correctly, relaxing and spreading your fingers apart. This way you obtained a kind of translucent ectoplasm that could float through the air, pass through walls, drift along the St. Lawrence to Rivière-du-Loup or someplace else, all the way to Russia. It could go far, very far.

Despite my efforts to go undetected in the schoolyard, Jimmy Côté was always popping up nearby. First, he wanted to be sure that I was, indeed, the son of Henry VIII. Then, with the help of other birds of a feather, he made it clear that uniforms were a sore point with him. For me, 1982 was the year of stomach- clenching cramps. Not a day went by without an ambush, not a single recess was terror-free. I took refuge in the henhouse.

There, too, things were beginning to fall in around me. The rate of lay had plummeted with the cold nights. One morning, death visited my hens for a second time. It was the little brother who came running back in from the henhouse, panicked by what he had just seen there. The temperature had dropped below zero during the night. Clearly no one had ever explained rigor mortis to him. At a loss for words, he lay down on his back and showed us that one of the hens had taken up the very same position and was refusing to budge. The hen must be dead, we explained to him. “It can't be,” he maintained. “Its eyes were open.”

I investigated. A hen had indeed died during the night. One of the younger ones. There was no sign of injury. A perfunctory autopsy revealed that she had been bitten from behind. The king suspected a weasel. The other hens went about their business, blissfully unaware. I had a new enemy to deal with.

Things began to heat up at school. Jimmy and his gang of mercenaries had taken over the schoolyard. Mr. Ferguson's ghost stories seemed to have little effect on them. One day in October, the tension reached boiling point. With my thoughts consumed by my hen's murder, I had forgotten my fear of Jimmy and didn't see him and his gang walk over. They began with a few slaps I didn't see coming, a classic technique. I don't know what came over me that day; I think the weasel affair had left a bitter taste in my mouth. Not that I was overly fond of my hens. Truth be told, they were a lot of work and were becoming harder and harder to look after. No, on that particular morning, I was mostly thinking about the nasty weasel and its treacherous attacks, and I felt an anger the size of a pea forming somewhere deep inside me. The pea grew, filled out, and took on a personality of its own that had as many qualities as flaws. Without really understanding why, and without really looking up, I grabbed Jimmy's first apostle by the throat and held him tight until he began to turn blue. The colour went perfectly with his eyes and shoes, I thought. A touch too pale, perhaps. A deathly shade of blue would suit the little blond runt to a T. I would have to tighten my grip a little. Julie Santerre and her chicks would usually cheer on battles and acts of violence against me, cackling: “Blood! We want blood!” This time, they were there all right, but they were so astounded, they'd been struck dumb. It was as though it was
their
necks I was gripping in my hand. They didn't come to the wretch's defence, nor did they encourage him to kill me, as was their wont. Jimmy Côté, completely taken aback, made no move to step in and help out his vassal, which speaks volumes about honour among hoodlums. The boy was slowly turning blue right before my eyes, while I marvelled at just how strong my arms were. I silently thanked Henry VIII for getting me into body building.

This flash of manliness was proof positive that integration is possible, no matter the setting, provided you make a little effort. The pecking order wasn't set in stone, after all. A simple throttling was enough to rejig it. No need for anyone to lose any teeth. Julie Santerre and the chicks still didn't say a word. I could feel the heat rising from the kid's neck beneath my fingers. His carotid artery was throbbing right where my thumb and index finger met. His pulse was racing. I wondered if he, too, was going to fall on his back, eyes open, teeth clenched. He was so thin. Just a few more weeks' training, I thought to myself, and I'd be able to snap his neck with one hand. I imagined the cracking sound his vertebrae would make as they snapped. Whispers went up from the students crowded around me. Someone prayed to God. The aesthete in me still wasn't happy with the colour of the little hoodlum's face; his skin was so soft and pale. I'd never thought of him as good-looking, but now the blond kid almost moved me to pity. My breathing accelerated. A girl cried out.

I felt a powerful hand grab my wrist. It was Mr. Ferguson. A ghost must have tipped him off. The dead always rat on you. Ironically enough, my victim, the fair-haired boy, was the one who found the drowned sailor's body on the beach. Had he shouted so loudly that day because the sailor's blue face prophesied this October morning in 1982 when he was almost choked to death? Can you read the future in a winkle? Mr. Ferguson, who must have eaten his own fair share of eggs, separated me from my victim. Colour was slowly returning to the boy's face. I stood there, breathing hard, arms by my sides, in front of Julie Santerre and her chicks, Jimmy Côté and his hoodlums, and Mr. Ferguson. There was a deathly silence. And yet I wasn't thinking of them at all. I was thinking back to the soft, throbbing neck of that little fair-haired boy; to our breathing, together as one; to his beautiful blue eyes rolling back in his head; to his hair, as fine as the hair on the heads of Étienne's dolls; and to his pink-blue lips, the colour of winkles.

The incident had the effect of a nuclear bomb going off in the schoolyard. The kid got his breath back and walked off, helped by his companions. Julie Santerre and her chicks had, for once, ceased their morning cackling. Surprise and bemusement being the usual way for poultry to grasp reality, the birds remained stunned for a while before they returned to their pecking. The sweet smell of death, like the promise of as-yet- unexplored pleasures, seeped into this scene from life on the Gaspé Peninsula. Mr. Ferguson was furious. I didn't care. I was on an astral journey of my own. Since he was in communication with the spirits, I would have liked Mr. Ferguson to assure me that, one day, the memories of Saint-Ulric would be nothing more than sorrowful archives. Everyone has archives. The problem with my own is that every little tremor sends dust flying from the hundreds of volumes. It gets right up my nose, chokes me, and forces me into a cleaning spree.

Funnily enough, no one ever called me a faggot at school again.

The weasel, on the other hand, continued to prey on my mind. The henhouse massacre continued. Each morning brought with it a new corpse. The weasel attacked only the weakest, which is to say, the younger chickens. I didn't get it. Had it been wolves or other birds, the threat would have been wiped out with a few pecks. The hens were huge and there were twenty of them against a tiny weasel. They had already proved they were vicious enough to kill one of their own to defend their territory. With a little intelligence, they could easily have made a midnight snack of the weasel. But there you have it: hens aren't very bright. Thousands of years in captivity has turned them into morons, to the extent they couldn't care less if they see one of their own die right in front of them, just so long as the pecking order is respected. They'll offer up the weakest—“Kill her! Kill her!”—without realizing they themselves will be the weasel's next victims. I now know that every omelette, every angel cake, every soufflé, and every bucket of Colonel Sanders' fried chicken brings us closer to a better, more intelligent world, where cruelty and pettiness do not exist. Reader! Have some chicken tonight without the slightest remorse! Vegetarians! Join our ranks and unite your digestive tracts against them! As with every great revelation in life, it took an animal as mundane as the hen to get me to see the light. One night, I came home from school to find my hens plucked and frozen. The king had butchered them. He had chopped all their heads off. One after the other. The heads were stacked in a pool of blood. I saw in Julie Santerre's lifeless eyes the imminent end of Anne Boleyn's reign and Jane Seymour's accession to the throne.

We weren't out of the woods yet.

At school, the pecking order had changed. I was no longer part of it. I wasn't at the bottom, and I wasn't at the top. I was in a class all my own. The blows I had once received were now destined for Étienne. I couldn't do anything to help him. Only watch. There's only so far an attempted murder can get you in a henhouse that size.

I never, ever, made fun of the smell of manure again.

B
efore the white men arrived
, the Gaspé Peninsula was inhabited by the Micmac. Slowly driven southward by European colonization until they were finally confined to reserves, these first inhabitants had already named rivers, bays, and capes. For example, in the Micmac language “Matane” means “beaver pond.” The Micmac were particularly close to the wildlife of the Gaspé Peninsula. In addition to their hunting grounds and the land they lived on, they left us legends about moose, owls, and belugas. At school, the Gaspé Peninsula's first inhabitants were never mentioned. Before the English, there had been the French, and before the French, there had been the Indians. There were no Indians anymore. “They left,” we were told. I remember occasionally wishing I were an Indian.

Legend has it that the Micmac thought the wind came from a huge bird beating its wings. It seems only natural to me that the Micmac were behind a legend about the origin of the wind: their ancestral lands were, and still are, exposed to very strong winds, which blow relentlessly practically every day of the year. It would have been strange indeed if the folklore of the First Peoples hadn't mentioned it. According to legend, there had once been a huge bird on the Gaspé Peninsula that would frantically beat its enormous wings, giving rise to gusts so strong that they stopped the Micmac from taking to sea to go seal hunting. It was decided that someone would have to find the bird and break one of its wings to put an end to the wind and allow the people to hunt so they could eat and clothe themselves. A hunter set out to find the animal and managed to break one of its wings. Dumbfounded, the bird stopped moving altogether. The wind died down all across the peninsula. Not another breath of air. The Gulf of St. Lawrence, as calm as a mirror, took on the exact colour of the heavens, so much so that there was no longer any way to tell the sky and the sea apart. The currents slowed to a standstill. The gulf became a huge pool of stagnant water, which the marine life deserted in no time. The people living beside the water understood too late that all life comes from the wind. The Micmac hunters, a little sheepish as one tends to be in such circumstances, called on the elders who, in turn, called on Glooskap, creator of the universe, the earth, and humankind. According to the myths behind the creation of the universe, Glooskap had created men and women by shooting arrows at birch and ash trees. The Supreme Being, reluctant to intervene where man had clearly erred, denied the elders their request for help. What men had broken, they would just have to put right themselves. And so other hunters were sent out in search of the wounded bird. When they found it, they captured it and cared for it. Once the bird was better, they set it free again, asking it to kindly beat its wings a little more slowly so they could live and fish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The French, English, and Irish settlers never had time for Micmac wisdom. The Europeans came with their own myths, crucifixes, and gospels. The great bird's existence was quickly forgotten as they set about clearing the land. But they didn't clear everything. In 1983, particularly on the Gaspé Peninsula, there remained huge swaths of woodland that still had the power to amaze the Europeans we sometimes send postcards to. In these infinite expanses of evergreen, knowing how to find your way around is crucial. The First Nations, it seems, relied on the internal compass that lives in each of us. Henry VIII, who wasn't Micmac, had learned how to use a real compass as a boy scout and had decided in 1983 that it was time for my sister and me to learn how to use one, too. And so he decided to organize a trip into the forest. The land that stretched out behind our house would do. First, we had to find a point on the horizon. A peak-shaped clump of trees right at the top of a hill. Between it and us stood fields, a river, a forest—the usual scenery.

Using a Silva compass is quite straightforward. A metal needle floats in a bubble of water. The red side points to magnetic north, which, where we were, was around fifteen degrees off true north. A dial shows the number of degrees to magnetic north. Since the needle always points north, it is possible to work out the angle between the direction you are walking—assuming you are walking in a straight line—and the line between the compass and magnetic north. The compass also comes with a sight gauge. By placing the compass on a horizontal surface below eye level, you can work out the angle between magnetic north and where you want to go. If you can't see where you want to go, you can also use a topographic map that shows degrees, minutes, and seconds, so that you'd have to be a complete idiot to get lost. The king had perfectly mastered the technique of finding his way around with a compass. It was agreed that we would set out around 1800 hours to reach our destination at approximately 2100 hours. As a precaution, the queen agreed to send us a signal from the dining room at 2100 hours precisely. She would flash the lights on and off three times. This signal would be clearly visible from on top of the mountain in the shadows of the woods.

We were very excited. The king never took us anywhere by himself. Since we had left Rivière-du-Loup, the queen had come along on almost every activity. I was intrigued by this sortie with Henry VIII. Once out of the court, the king became a very different person. He talked differently. He seemed freer, in a way. He would spend long spells in silence during which his thoughts would wander, far, far away. It wasn't the beer. The king never drank when he was on the move. But as soon as he sat still for an hour, he would start looking around for a bottle.

He had us take the azimuth. The azimuth is the angle formed by the destination, you, and the magnetic north pole. Three points are all you need. After that, once you start walking and have lost sight of the destination, you need to take shorter azimuths. For example, let's say, dear reader, that your goal is to reach a point whose azimuth is 160 degrees. You start walking. You know where you're going because when you left you established that the point you want to reach is 160 degrees off magnetic north. But for one reason or another you lose sight of your destination. A forest, a ravine, or a mountain suddenly stands between you and your goal. Don't panic. Get out your compass. Using the sight gauge, turn the dial to 160 degrees and find an immovable object (a tree, a rock, a church) in your line of vision. Now you know that if you walk toward this object, you'll move closer to your destination in a straight line. Proceed until your destination comes into view. You can't go wrong.

First we walked across fields. It was easy walking because nothing was growing there. Sometimes the owner would rent the field out to another farmer to grow barley. In those years, a golden plain would sway gracefully behind our house. The fields, the king taught us, were rented out because the small local farmers couldn't afford to buy all the land they needed for their livestock. Another oddity was that no one built in the field. And yet the ground was nice and flat—it would have been easy. Henry VIII explained to us that in the past, anyone at all could have bought themselves a field and built whatever they pleased. Now it was against the law. All of Quebec had been divided into white and green zones. You were only allowed to build in the white zones. Otherwise, you had to let the land lie fallow or grow something. You were, however, allowed to walk wherever you wished. I found it all very strange. The country was huge, and yet you weren't allowed to build on it as you pleased.

There was a small river at the end of the field. We could hear it babbling before it came into view. It didn't have a name. It cut across fields and hills and probably flowed into Rivière Blanche or the St. Lawrence. A tiny drop in the Gaspé Peninsula's water system. A number of wood cabins stood along the river. More shacks than houses, these uninsulated ramshackle homes were lived in by young families in the summer; families who, when winter came, sought refuge in miniscule apartments in town or in the village of Saint-Ulric. In the fall, the homes were heated with wood stoves. The chimneys gave off white smoke. Through the trees, the tiny homes looked like something right out of a fairy tale. Their inhabitants were on welfare; in other words, they didn't work. The king and queen didn't seem to approve of their chosen way of life. I would often hear them complaining about what they called the “welfare bums.” The king would quote Félix Leclerc: “The best way to kill a man is to pay him to do nothing.” There was no shortage of welfare bums in Saint-Ulric and Matane. They lived in a kind of parallel world. We were allowed to speak to them, but the king discouraged us from becoming too friendly with their children. Henry VIII ranked teachers, singers, and farmers very high on his world hierarchy. Welfare bums were right at the bottom. I slowly learned how to spot them. It wasn't very difficult, a bit like birdwatching. You just had to drive around with the king and wait for him to point out a welfare bum to know how to recognize one. At the time, in Saint-Ulric, we still had to share our telephone line with two or three families. We couldn't use the phone whenever the line was busy. As I recall, we once had to share our line with a family of welfare bums. I heard the king complaining that no one would ever be able to use the phone in our house because those people had nothing better to do than spend all day on the phone with other welfare bums. The party line also allowed us, provided we went about it very carefully, to listen in on other people's calls.

The river people, as we called them, were jobless. They ate canned food and often didn't even have a phone. Compass in hand, we passed by a cabin where a little boy lived. He would walk across the field every morning to wait for the school bus at the side of the road. He was feeble, pale, and sickly. We often saw him throw up in the snow whatever he had just eaten as he waited for the bus. His parents were very young. The mother was often ill, stretched out on a makeshift bed in the darkness, occasionally finding the strength to moan. Behind their cabin there was a henhouse, where turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl, and hens lived together in perfect anarchy. A flag with the fleur-de-lys on it hung as a curtain in the window. By the river, three or four rickety cabins—some with floors, others without—were home to other families who drew their water from the river. A parallel society lived there, far away from modern city life. At another time, in other circumstances, social services would have had the entire neighbourhood evicted, brandishing some act or other to protect something or other. It was a little corner of the third world, right here in Canada.

At school, the little boy was often spotted in the company of other children “of that breed,” as the king and queen referred to them. Two girls from Saint-Ulric, a redhead and a brunette, had taken him under their wing and saw to it that the others didn't peck at him too much. Sometimes I would listen in on the conversations in their corner of the henhouse. They would often talk about their parents' right to raise their hand to them. According to the two girls, it was perfectly normal. Almost all of the other children in the group agreed with them. Someone suggested that it was perhaps wrong for a father, even though he was head of the household, to beat his children, or anyone else for that matter. The two girls responded angrily. A father, they said, had every right to bring his children to heel. For instance, one of them told us her dad had thrown her down the stairs the week before because she had answered him back. Her companion added that her mom and dad beat her regularly. They were both proud to come from families where their parents still did things the good old- fashioned way. Their testimony reduced the other children to silence. So as not to question their convictions, we agreed with them: “Of course, if they want to, they have every right to. No one should ever take that away from them.” At times like this I thought that, all things considered, life in the court of Henry VIII wasn't so bad after all. In the yellow school bus on my way home, I imagined Henry VIII with a whip and stool, trying to bring someone to heel. It made me laugh. I often think back to those two girls who, now in their thirties, must be running after a child somewhere, broom in hand, as they fondly remember their father standing at the top of a staircase, his eyes bulging with rage. I'm glad I don't have any children because there's a huge wrought-iron staircase where I live in Montreal. It turns twice on its way down to the sidewalk. It has thirty steps. It was around 1975 that Child Protection Services was created in my province. And apparently since its creation, children have tended to walk rather than tumble down the staircases of Quebec.

The king didn't call in on the river people. Their little community didn't interest him. So we crossed the bridge to the forest. There, we lost our azimuth a few times. Through the fir, white cedar, and spruce trees, we stumbled around blindly in the soft light. The odd startled partridge would take off at our feet. Such noisy appearances by the birdlife froze the blood in my veins. I felt as though I was no longer at home, that I had desecrated somewhere sacred. Henry VIII told us that scarcely twenty years earlier he had been forbidden from hunting these partridges, but that Americans had been able to buy the right to hunt on stretches of land as big as Belgium and keep out Canadians who wanted to hunt. Salmon, moose, deer, and partridges had belonged to the Americans. But things had changed, and now we had the right to hunt and fish on our own land. Which was only common sense, I thought.

At last, we stepped out into a clearing. It was, in fact, a long corridor that had been cleared and that divided the forest in two. In the midst of this long strip, which stretched for thousands of kilometres, loomed tall steel towers connected by power lines. Henry VIII had us admire them and listen to the hum of the transformers. It was a worrying kind of everlasting music. He looked us right in the eye and told us that these towers carried the electricity produced by our nationalized hydroelectric power plants. Nationalizing them had cost a fortune, he stressed. Today, people in Montreal and far-flung Gaspé paid the same price for their electricity, and no one had to go without. Sounding sympathetic, he told us that villages in the sticks had once depended on sleazy dam owners for their electricity. These swindlers, who had also come from the United States, English Canada, and even England, had gotten rich on the backs of the people.