Life in the Court of Matane (9 page)

Now, I can hear you asking all the usual questions. “Given that it was raised by parents of a different species, doesn't the brown-headed cowbird suffer from an identity problem?” Not in the slightest. Raised in the nest of an American yellow warbler, it grows up with parents who don't look the least bit like it. While its feathers aren't suddenly going to turn yellow, you could be forgiven for expecting it to at least try to sing like its adoptive parents in a kind of tribute to them. You might think it would learn from the American yellow warbler and build a nest for its own young. But no. The brown-headed cowbird does none of those things. It leaves the nest one day and never comes back. On its travels, it meets other young cowbirds who have also abandoned their adoptive families. They strike up an instant rapport. They form groups. All summer long, they terrorize the fields of Saint-Antonin. And at the first hint of a nip in the air, they head south, flying over Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to spend their winters with like-minded brown-headed cowbirds on the lawns of Baptist churches. If, quite by chance, they were to happen upon the warblers that raised them, they wouldn't so much as bat an eye. The brown-headed cowbird isn't a creature of sentiment. That's all Madame Levasseur's book had to say about the brown-headed cowbird. I admired and respected that bird.

Some American researchers recently managed to explain how the brown-headed cowbird continues to ruin the lives of its victims. Because sometimes the host birds do, in fact, spot the intruder and fling the egg down onto the ground. But what the researchers discovered is that, after laying their eggs, the cowbirds keep a close eye on the warblers' movements. If they dare destroy the cowbirds' eggs, their nests are ransacked. And so to avoid this happening, the host birds have no choice but to sit on the cowbirds' eggs, feed their young, and raise them as their own.

Jesus of Nazareth
always played on television on Good Friday afternoons. My grandmother would let us watch it in peace until three o'clock. Then we had to observe a minute's silence for Christ who died on the cross. “He died on the cross at three o'clock on the dot,” she would tell us, turning off the television set just as Jesus was healing a blind man. I still wonder where she got that from and if that would be three o'clock in Greenwich, Jerusalem, or Saint-Antonin. I imagine faith transcends time zones. We kept quiet. Then, for a minute, we heard nothing but the reassuring tick-tock of the cuckoo clock. It reminded me of a Jacques Brel song: a clock that says yes, that says no, that's waiting for us. I stared at the painting by Micheline Raymond, professional cook, thinking of Anne Boleyn being sick in the toilet, of the Virgin Mary in tears on Calvary, of the brown-headed cowbird on the washing line, and of the birds that were forced to raise the offspring of others on pain of having their nests ransacked. Looking at the spray of flowers my mother had painted, I kept saying to myself that all reigns come to an end one day, that cooks and simple countryfolk make natural allies, and that I really must learn to make barley soup. Cod scales continued to appear behind my knees, but I wasn't so worried about it now. I was beginning to reconcile myself to chaos. And coming up with prayers of my own... Lord, forgive mischievous grandfathers for they know not what they do.

One day, my grandfather died. He silently withdrew from the world. It was snowing when we laid him to rest. The snow suited him perfectly. He had come into the world in February, and winter had taken him from us. It was just before Christmas. I swore that day to become just as mischievous and just as fat as he had been. I work on it every day. It's an exhausting regimen. I should manage it by the age of fifty, if I'm spared. I also want it to be snowing when I'm buried. I know you can't just order such things on demand, but you can always hope. Hope. That's what we learned on that particular Good Friday. Isn't that right, sis?

O
n occasion
, a mollusc will roll along a beach on the Gaspé Peninsula and shine its light on the shadows of humankind. That is how the winkle, a little edible marine gastropod, came into my life just as I was preparing for the Holy Sacrament of Confirmation. If, on a winter's night, a traveller should stop in one of the frozen villages along the Gaspé coastline—one of the villages with a silver church spire that pierces the northern sky, where, come evening, the waves can be heard lapping at the huge blocks of ice washed up on the shore—he would experience a moment of polar silence that would remind him of the troubling existence of God. Were he to knock on any given door, any one at all, he might be invited inside to warm up. With a little luck, he'd be offered a bite to eat. The lady of the house, sometimes known as the queen of the household, would take a huge jar of molluscs in brine out of the fridge. But behind this innocent offering was a vocabulary test designed to judge the visitor. We should all know how to behave in such a situation, because a single word will tell you more about yourself than any autobiographical novel filled with truths and half-truths.

The savvy traveller will exclaim, “Oh!
Bigorneaux
!” which will earn him a smile of approval and perhaps a friendly correction: “We call them
borlicoccos
around here.” You might also say, without fear of reprisal, “
Bourgots
!” which, while not zoologically correct, at least has the merit of being understood by the locals. But someone who fails to do their homework before setting out may think they're “
escargots de mer
”: sea snails. And in this case, it is possible that the local woman, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth, will correct the stranger. Because the sea snail simply does not exist in the French language. It's a name that was invented for educational purposes to refer to a marine mollusc as opposed to its land-based counterpart. A sea snail no more exists in French than does a
cheval de mer
: a sea horse. It's perfectly comprehensible, but you should say
hippocampe
instead. And a visitor who takes his research a shade too seriously could announce, with some pride, that he loves eating
Littorina littorea
, the winkle's awkward scientific name. In this particular case, the woman of the house will reply “Eating
what
?!” looking the stranger right in the eye. You see, no one, except perhaps for a handful of socially challenged classicists, would ever order
Gadus morhua
; everyone eats cod. Your Latin prowess will impress no one here. Also, be sure to avoid “
vignot,
” unless you want to pass for a Norman washed up on the Gaspé shoreline. The terms “
bigorneau commun
,” “
bigorneau gris
,” and “
bigorneau anglais
” may be perfectly accurate and accepted by the Canadian Wildlife Service, but such a degree of precision is unnecessary for the conversation at hand. “
Buccin
” is also best avoided.
Buccins
are much smaller than
bigorneaux
. They're used in
buccin
- spitting contests, which involve sucking the
buccin
into your mouth right out of the shell and spitting it as far as possible. The sport is practiced largely in the French departments of Brittany and Charente-Maritime. A tourist over from Belgium might say “
caricoles
,” while an Englishman would be delighted to see some “whelks.” A Laotian immigrant, fresh off the boat, probably wouldn't say anything at all. Laotians who turn up on the Gaspé Peninsula are rarely talkative, as this story will show.

Even though there was a winkle-processing plant in Matane, the king and queen never brought any home. Apparently, there was a limit to their love of fresh local products. We know very little of the winkle's behaviour. And, truth be told, it is of interest to virtually no one. The animal stirs no romantic feelings, no curiosity, unless it finds itself on a plate. In this respect, the winkle confirms Aristotle's classification of the animal kingdom, in that it is only of interest because it can be eaten. And yet I suspect it might harbour unusual intentions, as this story may yet reveal.

We were living, back then, at our ninth address, in the countryside close to Matane, on Saint-Ulric's rural route number four. We were on our fourth elementary school and living in the second house that Henry VIII had built with his own hands, in the style of a typical Quebec home. A case of looking to the future while acknowledging the past? The king was going through a period of reconciliation with his architectural and culinary heritage. Needless to say, cod was part of this trend and we ate it in copious amounts. The year 1981 had a distinctly maritime flavour.

When I was eleven years old, the entire court moved into this home in Saint-Ulric. As per the province's education act, my sister and I were sent to the village school, as though to signal that we weren't quite at the end of the world. I ended up in the class of Madame Nordet, a long-time teacher and devout Catholic.

In my class there was a strapping tomboyish girl by the name of Nathalie, whose parents bred horses. She spoke very loudly and was given to bouts of explosive laughter. I was in grade four. That spring day when I walked into my new class in Saint-Ulric, the teacher asked me to read a passage from a book to see what level I was at. I made every effort, as Sister Jeannette had taught me, to articulate each syllable and give every sentence a sense of rhythm. The good nun would have been so proud to see that her lessons had borne fruit. My reading was flawless. Nathalie, however, found my lisp ridiculous and said as much. “He talks with the tip of his tongue!” she shouted, when my performance was over, giving an especially ugly laugh. A chain reaction ensued. She had wanted to put me in my place for daring to show my culture. That day, from an ill-lit corner of the classroom, there came for the first time the terse and destructive condemnation I was to hear several times a week for years on end, right up until I left the Gaspé Peninsula for good.
Faggot
. A cutting, scathing put-down, delivered in a tone that contained all the contempt in the world. There seemed to be no way to shake this label. I didn't know what a faggot was, but I knew I didn't want to be one. I was serving the sentence before having committed the crime.

Before I came to Saint-Ulric, I had a soft spot for mature ladies who wore a cross around their necks. Madame Nordet helped develop my understanding of the world. She told us in September that we were to immediately begin preparing for confirmation, which would be held in the springtime, a little after Easter, to coincide more or less with Pentecost. The ceremony was to confirm—as the name suggests—the promises I had made at my baptism, three weeks after being born, in the church in Amqui. I tried in vain to recall the ceremony on July 11, 1970. What had I pledged to do? A certificate of baptism, which the king took great care of and which I had to produce on many an occasion, proved that the baptism had indeed taken place. The document provided my mother's name, a quirk of history in the court of Henry VIII. And now I was to go through the whole rigmarole all over again. This time we would have to learn songs, read countless stories, and practice a meticulously planned ritual for months on end, with the Holy Spirit playing the leading role. Throughout the ceremony, tongues of fire would descend from heaven to bring us knowledge and wisdom. In short, we were going to recreate the miracle of Pentecost on a smaller scale on the Gaspé coast. It was against this liturgical backdrop that a crack began to form in the concrete faith in the Church that Sister Jeannette had instilled in me. It all began with an attempt to illustrate the gospels. One day, Madame Nordet asked us to use our pencil crayons to draw the following scene:

19
And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho
.

2
And, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief among the publicans, and he was rich
.

3
And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the press, because he was little of stature
.

4
And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him: for he was to pass that way
.

5
And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, ‘Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house.
'

6
And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully
.

7
And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying that he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner
. (Luke 19, 1-7)

Yes, Jesus stayed with Zacchaeus. At Zacchaeus's stayed Jesus. Readers at this point may wish to repeat the last two sentences three times and have a good laugh. The story aimed to show us that Jesus was accessible to even the littlest amongst us. I liked the idea. Although I didn't consider myself “little,” I often wondered if having reached the age of reason and being old enough to understand certain things meant that I was worthy of attention in the eyes of Jesus. I poured every talent I had into the Jericho scene. The houses didn't pose much of a problem since I had seen them in other depictions of the gospels. White squares with flat roofs and wooden beams. Nothing too hard about that. Zacchaeus and Jesus weren't too difficult either. Two white, rectangular tunics with a thick beard on top and a haircut like the singers from Harmonium in the 1970s. Child's play. The sycamore gave me trouble, though. “Madame Nordet, what's a sycamore?” Madame Nordet was sometimes irritated by my questions. Once I had asked her if Jesus might simply have walked across a frozen stretch of lake to confound his apostles. “Impossible!” she replied. “Lakes do not freeze in the Holy Land!” She may well have been right. As for my sycamore, she told me it was a very large, multicoloured tree, which didn't help me very much. Multicoloured? Did she mean blue, red, and violet or orange, yellow, and red? For fear of creating a monstrous hybrid species, I decided instead to draw a tall maple for Zacchaeus. I had only to look out into the schoolyard to see my model. I gave the holy drawing my all. I had to resharpen the same wooden pencils several times and concentrate fully, forgetting everything around me. The maple would be so beautiful that people would come from Rome to see it. The bishops of Canada would be so amazed they'd ask the pope to have the gospels amended to refer to a maple, not a sycamore, from then on. New believers would imagine Zacchaeus perched on the branch of a huge maple tree, not in a tree that had such a strange name we had trouble drawing it. Lost in these spirals of artistic creation, possessed by the spirit of Zacchaeus—a man I would identify with for years to come—it was a near-mystic experience for me. My drawing surpassed my every expectation. I showed it proudly to Madame Nordet. She gave it a distracted glance and said, sounding clearly disappointed, that my sycamore looked more like a maple. I reminded her that I had asked her what a sycamore looked like and all she had said was that it was a large, multicoloured tree.

“I didn't say it was a maple.”

“Have you ever seen a sycamore?”

“Um, no!”

“Well, how can you say my tree's not a sycamore then?”

Madame Nordet was offended and unamused at my line of questioning. She knocked off a few points for failing to follow instructions and ordered me to go sit back down with my maple tree. I was so insulted that she had rejected what I considered to be the world's finest depiction of a maple that I decided that, from that moment on, I would have the apostles wear scarves and wristwatches and fly jet planes in the skies over Palestine as a backdrop to the feeding of the multitudes.

Something told me that Madame Nordet was mistaken. When I got home, I headed straight for my dictionary to be clear in my own mind. The definition for sycamore read: “A type of European maple tree with five-pointed leaves.” It was a bitter victory. Zacchaeus had, in fact, been perched on the branch of a Palestinian maple. Sometimes the scriptures can miss the point altogether.

The affair hadn't diminished in the least my resolve to prepare for my confirmation with all the ardour required by the Holy Sacrament. My first communion had left me a little revolted because it felt so close to cannibalism. My first confession, which had also taken months to prepare for, I had also found trifling. Was I really going to own up to thoughts of regicide to a stranger in the half-light? Confirmation, on the other hand, with all its pomp and circumstance, filled me with inspiration. And the songs they were teaching us were much better than any we had known before. Apart from Extreme Unction, now all that remained on the Church's program of sacraments were marriage or holy orders. I wasn't planning on either. Somehow I managed to confuse the arrival of the archbishop, who was to preside over the ceremony, with the arrival of the Holy Spirit. The old gentleman was coming up from Rimouski, and this was not the time for a single false note. I don't think we could have done more had we been welcoming the pope himself. In 1981, the Holy Spirit was an old man, up from Rimouski.

There is a photograph of me and my sister with the archbishop of Rimouski. I think my sister has it. The holy man, once every two years, embarked on a springtime tour that took him hundreds of kilometres from the seminary in Rimouski to honour all the children along the Gaspé coastline with a little slap on the face on the occasion of their holy confirmation. Route 132 became one long rosary for him, every bead a village along the way. While this travelling dove experienced the mystery of the Pentecost four times a week every spring, for us the ceremony was well and truly unique. A simple priest had sufficed for baptism, communion, and confession. But for something as serious as the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, a higher rank was required. Given the uniqueness and singular nature of this event, the communion preparations seemed like insignificant babbling in comparison to the preparation that went into the ceremony. Even today, when things are quiet, I sometimes find myself humming the theme music in the most surprising circumstances. When I'm doing the dishes. Scouring the bath.
Come Holy Spirit, come. Come Holy Spirit, come and live in us today.
As soon as we went back to school in September, the grade five and six teachers, eager to show the archbishop what they were made of when it came to matters pastoral, launched into a program to prepare us for confirmation that taxed our young minds as much as preparing for the bar would have done. Eager to please, I yielded to the degrading exercise, learning hymns and prayers by heart, if only to irritate the king and queen.