That Dammed Beaver, page 19
“God can’t have wanted us to recognize each other,” the priest concluded.
“Still, there were a lot of things I’d have liked to tell you, Monsieur le curé.”
“You can tell them to me, now, François Laterrière. It’s never too late.”
And François did. There was Siméon Désilets and his tavern, there was his marriage to the Chief’s daughter, the canyon and the dead cow, Eglantine’s death and the birth of Chaouac, Beauty Rose and her Tourist Rooms, and the Calgary Stampede.
Upon my soul, thought Monsieur de Saint-Justin. I foresaw nothing like this when I sent this boy to the Farwest!
François also told him about the milkmaids, but out of regard for his listener, he arranged the episode in such a way that it appeared edifying.
“There you are, Monsieur le curé. That’s the story you’d have heard in Calgary if by chance we’d recognized each other.”
“Very well,” said Monsieur de Saint-Justin, “but what happened next?”
What happened next presented François with certain difficulties of narration. It had come to pass that the said Frank Laterreur, having constantly to pit himself against the bulls, had ended up resembling them in one very significant way, the consequences of which are easy to imagine when one considers that he was spending his nights in the Tourist Rooms and that more often than not the four chamber maids whom Beauty Rose reserved for clients also slept there. He took advantage of the fact that they were his daughter’s wet-nurses and insinuated himself into their company, with the result that the clients soon ceased to receive the attentions they were accustomed to. The affairs of the Tourist Rooms declined, seriously damaging those of the adjoining tavern. All of which would have given Beauty Rose cause to complain, but Beauty Rose herself had no time to think about it, being, in spite of her age and her morals, just as well served as her maids. The honeymoon lasted four years. After which, business picked up again and improved from month to month. Two years later, Tourist Rooms and tavern were flourishing as before. It was the said Frank who had gone under. The bulls had stopped hating him, he himself no longer detested them, and from there it followed that everything else was changed. Jesse Crochu had fired him. Beauty Rose now did the same.
“Your daughter is six years old,” she told him. “There’s nothing to stop you putting her in a convent now. I’ll not be able to help you anymore. As it is, I’ve given you far more than I need have done. I’ve paid off my debt to the late Siméon. Farewell, Nephew!”
François Laterrière, ex Frank Laterreur, fallen champ, now not even worth his weight in beef, left Calgary, taking with him his Chaouac, his bright little flame, his only passion. In Regina and Winnipeg he worked as a butcher, in Toronto as a gangster. When he reached Montreal, Chaouac was turning fifteen. She was well educated and beautiful. Together they opened up Tourists Rooms, and fortune smiled on them…
“Very well,” said Monsieur de Saint-Justin. “What happened after that?”
“After that…well, er…” What happened after that, it seemed, presented certain difficulties of narration. Here was the gist of it.
With a sweep of his hand, François indicated, over by the presbytery, the huge black limousine, in which he had driven up like a prime minister.
“My, my,” said the priest. “What a big car! I’m very glad indeed. Then the advice I gave you wasn’t so bad after all!”
“It was good advice, Monsieur le curé, and I thank you for it. However, I must tell you that I didn’t carry out the mission you entrusted me with.”
“What mission? I don’t remember any mission.”
“To be a habitant in the Farwest, a habitant like my father and my grandfather and all the Laterrières of Maskinongé county.”
“Forget it, François, forget it! You’ve kept your faith. You’ve kept your language. And you’re rich. What more could anyone ask?”
François Laterrière was sad, for he knew himself to be unworthy of the priest’s approval.
“Besides,” the priest went on, “even if you didn’t succeed in putting down roots there yourself, the conquest of the Farwest by our people is going well.”
He pulled out some photos of his trip, showing the various houses in which, twenty-five years earlier, French was still being spoken.
“What do you think of this one?” he asked.
François recognized his own house in the canyon.
“Doesn’t it look just like one of our own?”
“Yes, indeed, Father.”
“When we visited it, the owner was away. A cow had climbed up into the attic, and she was standing there, with her head out the window, mooing and mooing. I said to her: ‘Now stop your mooing. Your master’ll soon be home.’ And I blessed the house.”
François Laterrière took leave of Monsieur de Saint-Justin. The village around the church had not changed. In his big car he drove through Trompe-Souris. Trompe-Souris had not changed either. The parishes of Quebec took on their definitive shape in the last century. Since then they haven’t budged, hardening like cases around their inhabitants and retaining always the same invariable number, the number they held one hundred years ago. François found his childhood still intact. And yet, in spite of this, he was a stranger in the village and in the rang; his place was no longer here. But then, had it ever been here? Temporarily, perhaps until such time as he could grow up and be expelled to an absurd Farwest. For he belonged to that surplus humanity that the Quebec parishes have continually to reject, in benefit of foreigners, and exploit and sell, the grimacing face of the puritan prostitute.
When François Laterrière left Saint-Justin the first time, wearing his cow-hide boots, he wept, and could find no solace til, in a far-off canyon, he had managed to recreate the likeness of his Homeland. When, thirty years later, in his big black limousine, he left the village for the second time, no tears blurred his vision. He knew then that he had never been loved. He also knew that a country that values itself more highly than its children and doesn’t hesitate to get rid of them, sending them off to the cities, to the mines, to every corner of America, without thought for their fate, concerned only with the preservation of its own old togs, is a country that does not deserve to be loved. And he was perhaps sadder than the first time.
When he got back to Montreal, he sold his Tourist Rooms. No one has ever enjoyed running a brothel, and François Laterrière was no exception. He had been driven to it out of necessity. After the death of Eglantine and the failure of his mission, with nothing left to guide him, he had understandably sunk very low, low enough to collect the wages of sin and to bounce back onto the highways in a big, black limousine, like a prime minister. This limousine he also sold. Soon he was free to go as he pleased. He returned to that absurd and unlikely canyon, which was the place in all America where he felt least like an exile. Meanwhile, at his side, with staring eyes, her head stuck out the attic window, the dead cow mooed in the direction of an unattainable Trompe-Souris.
(Translated by Betty Bednarski)
TALMUD
MATT SHAW
Yes! She was not balding and she had excellent fashion sense. She had not lost her husband to poker, or her only daughter, just eighteen, to a burlesque-revival show in Chicago. All truths, but not for Lilly, who could contort any fact into falsehood. This delusion inspired her to sell her split-level Canadian home, pack two suitcases (crammed with bikinis and lacy bras) and move to Europe, where she had sensuous affairs with thirteen European men before birthing a child and returning to Canada, alone, to live in a small log cabin on the western shore of Lake Erie.
The European men refused to wear condoms because they were too thin for amorous European sex (of thirteen kinds, including Spanish, French, and Slovakian). She became pregnant. The boy was named Talmud and she left him with the man she presumed was his father, Iran, a portly aficionado of cigars and American pop culture who was actually Russian-American and not foreign in the least. She wrote Iran a cheque for $5,000 and promised to send more. He was happy to live his new American Dream of the doting single father, but in Amsterdam, which he found more hospitable in his dotage. He hugged Talmud against his chest as Lilly boarded an airplane to New York and shouted a promise that Talmud should visit her when he turned twenty and she had adjusted to the idea of motherhood.
Lilly did not know how to live a small-town life. She bought a hatchback and drove it sparingly. She lit her sparse lakeshore cabin with candles of all manners, sizes, and scents. She bought a body pillow to simulate the presence of another being beside her. She applied for a job as a waitress at a faux-fifties diner on the town’s main drag and dressed every morning in a checkered vinyl skirt, earning a living and growing older.
After three years she felt cervical pain and sought the town gynecologist, but he was stymied. The pain increased and her hair thinned until she saw patches of her scalp in the mirror. She wore hats before realizing it was a useless charade. She quit the diner and stayed home whenever possible, reading histories and biographies of famous and less-famous celebrities and politicians, and often of the dogs or women that they loved, and walking along the lake with her feet in wet sand, wishing she could bury herself in it.
During this period she received the first visitor who knew of Iran and Talmud. He arrived suddenly, without luggage. He might have been sent, Lilly thought. His name was Pahl, he was from Norway, and he said Iran was a very good friend. Iran had indeed told him he would find Lilly here if he ever travelled in Canada. Talmud was beginning school now and could write his name very legibly. This made her happy. She slept with Pahl, fucked him silly, as the ladies at the diner would say, and it dulled her uterine pain. In the day, they stayed apart, each doing their own business. At such times Pahl was less a visitor than a guest in need of a room.
In the evenings they played Scrabble and then they fucked. And in the morning she went to the white beach. When the sheets were humid and tangled she sometimes asked him about Talmud. What else might he know? Nothing, he would say, nothing, until he drifted off in an interminable snore.
Soon she was nearly bald except for a ring of auburn hair that ran from ear to ear. Her water storage tanks were unreliable and she cut her bathing schedule to twice a week to conserve water. Her skin felt dirty and she neglected to shave her legs, her underarms, or the dark hair that grew up her lip and on her chin.
She received another visitor, Anders, who arrived in a pickup truck and was as burly a man as she had ever known. She badly wanted to sleep with him. Her memory of Pahl faded, but Talmud still tumbled in pieces from her mouth.
Anders could not be forgotten. His odour was strong. When he came in her he squeezed so she felt her ribs crack, and he broke the couch he slept on with his girth. While Anders might have been large, he was so ubiquitously large in every aspect that he lacked any other quality of physical distinction or heritage. His eyebrows were neither thick nor thin, his hair neither dark nor light; if she saw his face in a crowd along Times Square or at a music festival, she might not recognize him at all.
She made him meals of ham and eggs, trays of toast, or basted turkeys and yams, as she prodded him. What are you, she said, and before he could be insulted, she added: I mean, where are you from, or your parents? Are you Hungarian? Yes, he said. I am Hungarian. Is that all you are? Lilly asked. No, I am also Swedish. I am American, and Icelandic, and Hungarian, and Swedish. For her part she saw no Swedish in him. So he was not someone to ask anything of, not seeming to be anything himself. She never asked him about her son or told him what Pahl had known, that the boy could write his name. Lilly desperately wanted Talmud to send a postcard with his name on it.
Anders spent a time there, the particular length of which she could not remember, but as he prepared to return to Switzerland he startled her by saying that Iran was now living there with Talmud, who was beginning the third grade. He said it quickly, without so much as a head turn. Lilly was scarcely sure she heard him. He wrote her a cheque for the room. No, no money required, she said, I’m not an inn. Don’t be ridiculous. He laughed. It’s not for the room, he said.
Lilly no longer had any use for dresses or stockings, and so discarded them. Her breasts adapted to their new freedom and shrunk against her chest. She rarely saw anyone and had no one to compare herself with, but she felt taller. Her shoulders were broader. She was comfortable urinating anywhere on the secluded beach or in the clumps of trees. In the absence of guests she was perfectly alone and free to wonder if her life was part of some cosmic joke, if all of this was the beat before the punchline of a comic who had lost his timing.
Iran, the Russian-American in Switzerland, never wrote her with news of Talmud, though she still sent money for the child. But the cheques became smaller. She was out of work now, and out of sorts with herself, and could ill-afford the international cheques and eventually mailed personal cheques. And when she felt she could order no more cheque books (and see the carbons of how little she was providing her abandoned son) she sent IOUs on sticky refrigerator notes. Freedom she had, and a body whose androgyny released her to feel whatever she wanted, to express it too: she could curl on a swinging chair on the deck and push the remnants of her breasts against her knees and rock herself like a child (or a mother rocking a child) or she could cut timber, pound her fists against the stumps, and walk through the forests barefoot.
Win was very slender, effeminate, and of Thai descent. He did not announce himself until he closed the cabin door and said My name is Win, and I was told I could board here. He was short and fragile and moved with such grace that he mesmerized Lilly. He spoke softly and ate tofu. If he noticed her appearance it was unimportant or common. Win was, however, difficult to talk to. When he touched her it was a faint tickle, and when he left the house the doors never slammed. When he cooked meals, the silverware did not clank, the blender did not whirr, and knives never clunked against the cutting board. Win said he was on a tour of North Americ a and that he was enamoured with the Great Lakes. But on Talmud he seemed to have nothing at all to say.
For the first time in her life Lilly seduced a man. There was no trick to it, none that she remembered reading about in the magazines or had seen in television movies. Win drifted in and out of the cabin, and she would wait for him to come back, yet whenever he entered a room she was caught off-guard by his silence. Then she would grab him and motion toward the bed, but he said That is not right, that is not how you do it. She tried, but Win said again and again that it was wrong. She grew tired of his rejections and one morning threw Win on the bed. He moaned. She bit his wrists and pushed his body into a prone position. She could not remember who entered who but the sensation was fiery and as deep-nerved a pain as she had known, like childbirth. Through the window they resembled two trees in a hurricane. Where the fuck’s my son? Lilly demanded. What can you tell me about my son? Win looked at her in confusion. You have a son? he asked. What’s his name?
She spent entire days walking past cottages on the white sand. The fat which had made her so much larger tightened into muscle. Her hands grew rough with the work of keeping the cabin. She went to the department store and bought several large flannel shirts, jeans, and a pair of boots, sold the car and the cabin, bought a plane ticket for Switzerland where, on the advice of two of his favourite prostitutes, she found Iran at a spa in Tribschen. He wore a long, tattered bath robe, the untied sash trailing damply along the sauna floor. They fucked in the dense steam, where they could not see each other, until Iran offered, tying his sash, to take Lilly home to meet her son. Yes, she said, yes. Outside, their bodies steamed in the cold, and for a while the car rose and fell unceremonoiusly among the mountains until Iran said, I’ve always thought he doesn’t look like me. But, I should tell you, he doesn’t look much like you, either.
IT’S NOT EASY BEING HALF-DIVINE
MARGARET ATWOOD
Helen lived down the street from me when we were growing up. We used to sell Kool-Aid off her front porch, five cents a glass, and she always had to be the one to carry the glass down the steps, eyelids lowered and with that pink bow in her hair, and mincing along like she was walking on eggs. I think she palmed a few nickels, being hardly the most honest type. I know she’s famous and all now, but quite frankly she was a pain in the butt then and still is. She used to tell the worst lies – said her dad was somebody really high up, not the Pope but close, and of course we teased her about that. Not that this so-called big shot ever showed his face. Her mum was just another single mother, as they call them now, but my own mum says they had another name for it once. She said they had goings-on at night around there, naturally, since every man in town thought it was being handed out for free. Used to throw pebbles at the door, shout names and howl a bit when they got drunk. The two boys, Helen’s brothers – they were pretty wild, they took off early.
When she was ten, Helen went through a circus phase – liked to dress up, thought she’d be a trapeze artist – then she got close with the woman who ran the beauty salon, used to do her hair for her and give her product samples, and then she started drawing black rims around her eyes and hanging around the bus station. Fishing for a ticket out of town, is my guess. She was good-looking – I’ll grant her that – so it wasn’t surprising she got married early, to the police chief, a prime catch for both of them as he was pushing forty.
Then just a few months ago she ran off with some man from the city who was passing through. Didn’t need the bus ticket after all, he had his own car, quite the boat. Hubby’s pissed as hell; he’s talking about a posse, go into the city, smoke them out, beat the guy up, get her back, smack her around a bit. A lot of men wouldn’t bother, with a tramp like that; but it seems he doesn’t believe in divorce, says somebody has to stand for the right values.
