The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories (5 page)

I listened to my father in the evening too, after supper, out on the gallery that went around the house. The men from the village came there to smoke and chat and rock in their chairs with him. He'd describe the tanks he'd seen pictures of in
L'Action catholique,
he'd describe them as though he'd been born in one. (I listened, my mother sighed.)

‘Now you see how deep the foundation of this house is: broad as your two arms spread wide open. Now the sides of a tank are just as thick. Our soldiers are safe inside them … No bullet's gonna get through that. Even the good Lord, he'd have a hard time getting through. But I hear the army's short of tanks … Oui Monsieur … The folks on this side, at peace, aren't sending over enough lead … Now if everybody gave a hand and sent a little lead — well, our soldiers'd be saved; it's drops that make an ocean. If everybody just sent one empty tube of toothpaste …'

He was silent then, smoking and dreaming. The men with him smoked and dreamed as well.

A few days later there were no more cases of toothpaste in the house.

When the war was over the children from the village who hadn't been killed returned to the fold. A party was organized to celebrate the victory and their homecoming. One of the veterans invited my father to take part.

‘Why sure, I'm gonna go and celebrate with the rest of you,' said my father.

‘You,' said the former soldier, ‘you sacrificed yourself for us from one end of the country to the other…'

‘That's the truth,' said my father. ‘You notice what nice white teeth the women got?'

E
VER SINCE
we'd started school Pierrette was the tallest girl in our class, the one who sat in the last row at the back, the one who was always last when we marched through the village in order of height, accompanied by two nuns as the wind tried to pull away their veils. Pierrette was a quiet girl; she didn't really attract our attention except when, in a sentence during reading or an example in grammar, the word ‘big' appeared; then all heads would turn in her direction and the classroom would be filled with noisy chortling; Pierrette would blush and be silent. Aside from that, Pierrette was like the rest of us, just another student; and that was why I wondered, when Pierrette walked by, why the big boys would stop yelling, put down their ball and stop to look at her.

One evening the men from the village were sitting with my father on the wooden gallery. Words rose in the air with the smoke from their pipes, words as dark as the night that was drawing near. They talked about how life was going badly in the world. But they declared they were happy there was a leader like Duplessis to protect Quebec. I listened, a child in their midst, fascinated by all that these men knew.

‘I'm scared about the future,' said one of them. ‘Duplessis won't be around forever, like the good Lord. And what'll happen to us when we haven't got Duplessis any more?'

Suddenly they were silent. They stopped smoking. Pierrette was walking along the sidewalk. Not talking, not smoking, they examined her. My father too.

‘Watch out, Pierrette,' one of the men called, ‘you're gonna lose them.'

The others guffawed and slapped their thighs with their big workers' hands, bent over and shaken by their laughter. Pierrette walked faster, to escape.

‘Papa,' I asked, ‘what's Pierrette going to lose?'

Hearing me, the men were paralysed, as though struck by lightning.

‘This is men's talk,' my father stammered, blushing.

The others, coming to his rescue, began to explain why it was that without Duplessis, ‘they'd've never got electricity in the stables.'

I left the group of men. Just what was Pierrette going to lose? I was far more obsessed by this question than by the future of Quebec or the politics of Duplessis. It prevented me from sleeping.

In the schoolyard the next day, I approached the territory reserved by the big boys for playing ball. A few minutes later, Pierrette appeared. The big boys broke off their game as though the ball had become a heavy stone. Their eyes followed Pierrette as though she were the Pope. It was time to take action.

‘Watch out, Pierrette,' I shouted, ‘you're gonna lose them.'

Pierrette fled, taking refuge in the school. One of the big boys picked up the ball and said to me majestically:

‘Don't get in a sweat, kid, they won't fall off, they're fastened on good and solid. I checked myself.'

The ball began to fly from one boy to the other, joyously, amid bursts of laughter. I decided then to laugh louder than all the big boys. But I still didn't know what it was that Pierrette was going to lose, and what was so firmly fastened on.

For days my glance followed Pierrette; I invented all sorts of tricks to uncover her secret. I spied on her from behind an open book, I brought a little mirror that I used so I could see behind me, I hid under the stairs Pierrette would walk down. But Pierrette still looked as she always did, timid, plump, blushing and the biggest girl in our class. The big boys could have explained to me but I didn't dare display my ignorance, I was so afraid of their mockery.

One morning, to celebrate a religious holiday, our whole class was taken to the church. All in a row, by order of height, we went to take Communion. But scarcely had we returned to school when the nun curtly ordered Pierrette to stand up. Blushing, Pierrette obeyed.

‘Instead of displaying such languorous, sensual postures in front of the men in our parish,' the indignant nun roared, ‘you'd be better off praying to God, Pierrette, to chase the evil thoughts from your possessed body. When a person has such provocative bumps on her body it's because the Devil's within you.'

Pierrette's face became even redder, then it suddenly turned white; she swayed and crumpled to the floor.

‘You see,' said the nun, ‘the Devil is leaving her body.'

When I approached Pierrette, who had fallen to the yellow floor when she fainted, I didn't see the Devil but I
noticed what I'd never noticed before: Pierrette's chest was puffed out just like a real woman's. But why couldn't the big boys go on playing ball when they saw her?

I hesitated for a long time before confiding in my friend Lapin.

‘Pierrette fainted today because the Devil put bumps on her body. Two big bumps, right here!'

‘Come on!' said Lapin, ‘it wasn't the Devil that did that.'

My friend Lapin was doubly superior to me: he was older and his father worked in the office of Duplessis' government in Quebec. I understood what his profession was when, after school, behind the big rock we used as a secret hiding place, my friend Lapin opened a paper bag as I watched him.

‘This comes from my father's office.'

He took out a dozen magazines that had nothing but photographs of girls on every page, girls with no clothes on; and all of them were possessed by the Devil because they had bumps! Bigger bumps than Pierrette. The magazines burned my hands like fire, but I was hungry to learn! I wanted to know! On every page I turned I could feel the sea of ignorance retreating. At every picture my body ceased to be that of a child and I became a man.

‘These magazines come from the United States,' said Lapin.

‘I'd like that, to live in the United States,' I said, slowly turning the pages.

I discovered that the United States was a truly amazing country because they knew how to print such beautiful magazines, while in Quebec the newspapers only knew how
to take pictures of Cardinal Villeneuve or Maurice Duplessis in his old hat.

‘In the United States,' Lapin explained, ‘the streets are full of girls like that!'

‘There can't be many Catholics in that country,' I said.

‘In the Protestant religion there's no such thing as sin.'

As I couldn't leave for the United States immediately to become a Protestant, I went back to school the next day as usual. That morning, I played ball with the others. When Pierrette came into the schoolyard I put the ball on the ground and watched her go past with the same expression in my eyes as the big boys.

N
EW BROTHERS
and sisters kept arriving endlessly; we had to enlarge our house. With vulgar words that burned our children's souls, the workmen scraped the cedar shingles off our house, knocked down the walls and blocked up the windows; beside new wood, hundred-year-old planks awoke from their sleep. It smelled good, like the forest, as though sap had travelled between the grooves joining the old wood to the new.

Then came the day when the workmen took off the roof. We were asleep in our beds at the usual hour, as we were every night. Our beds were in their proper places but our ceiling was the starry sky. Although our mother had taken from the chest woollen blankets, which, in wintertime, protected us from the threats of strong winds, we shivered as though we were about to sprout wings. Never had we seen the sky so vast. At times I had to clutch my blankets so I wouldn't topple into the enormous well. We had learned in school that there are more stars in the sky than there are flowers on earth. Each golden dot in the depths of the sky was billions of millions times bigger than I. Beneath the sky I was a grain of dust that the slightest wind could have swept
away; my hands clung to the blankets. Everything was good again. I listened to the good Lord breathing in His heaven. Why had He not given the children wings so they could soar from one star to another? Once again my bed seemed unstable, drifting on the blue water of the night; and again I clutched the sheets. Around me my brothers laughed dryly, like those who have little fear in their throats. I fell asleep. For me, the sky was a tranquil roof.

In the morning I woke up, bigger now because of the immensity of the sky. Never would I forget that when you live on earth you also live beneath the sky. Even now, man seems not to have been made of the earth under his feet but to have sprung from the sky above his head. It would be impossible for me to see myself in any other way than as a grain of dust lost on the crust of the sky.

We were dislodged from the sky by the workmen with their planks and nails, their saws and hammers. Downstairs in the kitchen, my father and mother were sitting at the big table. We jostled one another as we shouted, telling of our great adventure. Neither my father nor mother looked up. Their faces were marked with despair. Had they been crying? They didn't speak or move, they were bent down. On the table a letter lay unfolded.

‘Defraud the government…' my father moaned.

‘Defraud the government…' my mother repeated.

‘Defraud,' said my father again. ‘I never learned how to do that.'

My father was accused by the government of not paying all the taxes that he owed it. The government was demanding the unpaid balance, under the pain of a fine. My father
wanted to pay that very morning. For him, a man wasn't a man if he couldn't pay cash.

He thought, too, that a man isn't a man if he doesn't put a roof over his children's heads. Before we were born he went far away, behind the mountains, in search of money that would make him able to build a house like the one in the dream to which he often abandoned himself as he sat at the window, smoking. On Sundays he would select a volume, always the same one, from a series of books filled with pictures of far-off countries. He never read, but from page to page travelled to those countries where snowstorms didn't exist. One day, he stopped before a Greek temple: ‘Wife', he said, ‘that looks like the house I'm going to build you some day.' Later we would often see him open the book and, surrounded by the smoke from his pipe, spend long hours dreaming of the Greek temple.

When he had accumulated the necessary money, my father went to see the contractor, carrying the book under his arm. They spent the day arguing before the book, opened to the page with the Greek temple.

‘Defraud the government,' said my mother, ‘as though we weren't honest.'

‘Defraud — I don't even know what it means …'

We were on the stairs, bewildered by our parents' despondency, and we were silent. Suddenly my father rushed outside, furious. Never had anyone in the village seen him in a hurry. But that morning he ran, and people still remember it.

The contractor had just arrived to begin his day's work. My father stood, arms spread open, in front of the rusty,
dented truck, which stopped with a squealing of its old brakes.

‘I'm stopping the work!' my father shouted. ‘I'm stopping everything!'

The contractor burst out laughing. My father was famous for the funny stories he brought back from the other side of the mountains (and which he never told in the house); for the contractor, this joke about interrupting the work when he hadn't yet put the roof on the house was really very comical.

‘You'll have the only house without a roof in the whole county! Makes sense, though: you won't have to shovel off the snow in the winter!'

The contractor's face was red from laughing.

‘I'm stopping the work!'

My father was shouting so hard there were tears in his eyes. The women had come out on the galleries, lingering there as they pretended to be busy. The contractor, seeing my father cry, didn't dare believe it was a joke. He silenced the motor of his truck. My father got in and sat beside him.

Through the windshield, where the sun was reflected in the dust and mud, you could see only the two men's shadows. The children dared not come any closer and the women gradually went back inside the houses.

Then my father got out of the truck, which rattled, shook, turned around and went sheepishly back up the hill. My father came and took his place at the table where my mother waited for him, in front of the letter from the government. They didn't speak to each other.

A few minutes later the contractor walked into the house:
timidly, without saying hello, without looking at my father or mother, he placed a fat envelope on the table, then left as he had come in. My father's fingers, stained brown by tobacco, tore open the envelope and took out some banknotes in different colours, which he pushed towards my mother. She counted them carefully, almost piously.