Black Dance

V. TERREIRO

Milo, 1962–65

SUNDAY MORNING MASS in the tiny village church we’ve seen before. Now ten, Milo is seated in the third row next to his best friend, a boy named Normand. Heftier and quite a bit older than Milo, Normand has clearly been kept back in school a number of times. (A motley crowd, your crowd of friends, Astuto. All your life long, nothing but misfits and artists and outcasts, fat girls and queers.)

Bored, the two boys are playing with fire and the name of that fire is laughter. They pass the Sunday service schedule back and forth, each trying to make the other snicker with his doodles in the margin. Normand’s drawing shows a plumply pregnant young woman being peed on by a boy, and bears the title Hail Mary, what a disgrace. Milo manages to choke down his amusement. Now it’s his turn; he bends his head and scribbles. A moment later he hands his friend a drawing of apples, pears and cherries tumbling from between a woman’s legs, captioned Blessed be the fruit of thy womb. Normand snorts, causing heads to swivel.

Jean-Joseph Dubé leans over from the pew behind them. In a matter of seconds, he has lifted the program from Normand’s hand, looked at it, and passed it back to their teacher. Glancing at the paper in turn, Mrs. Morisette lets out a low cry of shock. As the congregation rises for the next hymn, she squeezes past everyone in her pew, strides up the aisle, grabs the two boys by the hair (though Normand is taller than she), and marches them back to the middle pews where the parents are seated.

Close-up on Milo’s face, shutting down.

CUT to the farmhouse kitchen: Marie-Thérèse screaming at him as she whips him on the back with Régis’s leather shaving strop:

“How dare you embarrass me like that in front of everybody! Stupid little pagan! Whore-son! Evil seed! I’ll scrub your soul clean if it’s the last thing I do on this earth!”

Beyond the windows in the backyard, using a saw as a guitar and an empty oil barrel as a drum, François-Joseph and Jean-Joseph are mock yodeling Roger Miron’s country-western hit at the tops of their lungs:

À qui le p’tit cœur après neuf heures?

Est-ce à moi, rien qu’à moi?

Quand je suis parti loin de toi, chérie

À qui le p’tit cœur après neuf heures?¹

CUT to the sky. A piercing sapphire-blue summer sky on a hot day. Crows flap across it, cawing blackly. Ominous, shimmering heat. The camera swoops down to a clump of poplar trees in a corner of the property, where Milo is sitting hunched on a tree stump.

We approach him gently from behind, then swing round to find his hands busy whittling.

A few seconds later, the statuette is completed. Though less than three inches high, it is expressive: two deer’s legs topped by a twofaced human head, one of the faces grimacing in fury, the other in fear. Milo holds it up and blows on it, scattering wood chips. Kneels at the foot of a tree, digs a hole in the ground with his penknife and deftly slips the statuette into it. Fills in the hole, pats down the dirt, smooths over the surface, pulls the grasses together above it until there is no trace of a disturbance. The Dubé property is being given an invisible but potent underground population: scattered here, there and everywhere, dozens of these figurines are in the ground already. They are Milo’s allies. Like his, their lives unfold in the darkness. Like him, they have to learn to find their freedom there.

Sound track: organ music. .

CUT TO NEIL’S library, a Sunday morning in January. Afflicted with a head cold, Milo has been allowed to miss Mass. Neil has settled him onto his lap and is reading out loud to him from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Milo reads along, exulting in the correspondence between the written and spoken words. Suddenly we see him laugh. The music fades.

“Is it not a marvel?” says Neil, gently covering the child’s small hand with his large, age-speckled one. “That this Irishman, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills, by himself rebaptized Wilde, born on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean in 1854, can make a Canadian boy laugh a hundred years later?”

“A hundred and eight,” says Milo.

“Wha?. . Yes, you’re right, a hundred and eight. And this is only the beginning, Milo. These shelves contain countless treasures. I’ll introduce them to you one by one. My library will be your school away from school and your church away from church. We must just keep it a secret from Marie-Thérèse; that’s not a problem, is it?” (Milo shakes his head.) “Books from all centuries and continents. Poems, tragedies, comedies, histories, war and adventure, nonsense and fairy tales. . All of humanity’s multitudinous joys and sorrows at your fingertips, my boy! Some of these volumes are worth a pretty penny. Look at this one, Milo. . and this one. . In my youth, the greatest writers of Ireland were my friends. James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. .”

“But they both say To Neil Kerrigan, not To Neil Noirlac.”

“Wha? Oh. Yes, well, you see, I changed names when I came over to Quebec.”

“You mean took your wife’s name?”

“No, no, she took mine, only it was. . a pseudonym, if you like. That means a false name. Writers often prefer to publish their books under a pen name, you see. . just as Oscar Wilde did.”

“And your children all took your false name?”

“Yes.”

“So my name is false, too? I should really be Milo Kerrigan?”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about that, Milo. By the third generation it becomes true. Now, listen, I have something important to tell you. . I’ve already made arrangements. . When I die, everything in this library will go to you. . But that, too, is our secret for the time being, yes?”

CUT to the living room downstairs. A Saturday afternoon in February. Fire in the fireplace, slow snow falling outdoors.

Now sixteen and fifteen, Jean-Joseph and François-Joseph are sprawled flat on the living room rug. Spectacular battles between cowboys and Indians unfold before their eyes in black and white, accompanied by bombastic music. The two boys gorge on fried potato peels, guzzle home-brewed beer, belch loudly. Every few minutes, testing the decibel potential of their newly matured male vocal cords, they roar with laughter. In the laundry room across the hall, Marie-Thérèse sighs in exasperation as she feeds clothes from the washer through the mangle.

CUT to Milo, who is hunting in the woods with his uncle Régis. He shoots a rabbit and the two of them rush up to it. The animal is large. Blood gushes from its nostrils into the white snow. Not wounded, dead on the spot. Milo’s bullet entered the brain just above the eye, leaving the body perfect and intact. Régis is proud of him.

“How come Grandad never comes hunting with us?” Milo asks his uncle as they head back to the house.

“Hah! The day Neil Noirlac starts hunting. .”

“But he told me he hunted moose, lynx and rabbit.”

“Oh, is that all?” Régis laughs. “Your grandpa tracks a different kind of prey.”

“But he told me he had a gun!”

“I’ve never seen it, but yeah, I’ve heard tell he’s got one. Brought it over from Ireland with him. A German revolver from the First World War, for the luva God!”

“Maybe he hunts at night?” Milo ventures hopefully.

“Right. And he eats the moose he kills at night, too, so he won’t have to share them.”

They bundle into the shed next to the house. As Milo looks on, Régis skins and guts the rabbit, using a sharp knife with consummate skill to make incisions, peel back the fur, slit open the stomach. Then he cups out the animal’s innards with his bare hands.

“Next time around, you skin what you kill. Okay?”

“Okay, okay.”

CUT.

When grace has been said, Marie-Thérèse lifts the lid of the pot: “Know who shot this rabbit? Milo did!”

“Smells heavenly,” says Neil.

“What?” says Marie-Thérèse. “Only God is heavenly, Papa. Stop your blasphemy. . And stop teaching Milo to blaspheme, you’re setting a bad example! You filled my brothers’ heads full of atheist writers, and look how they turned out: the only thing they’re good at is shoveling clouds. Do you hear me, Milo? Literature isn’t a job, it’s hot air. A lot of hot air, that’s what it is!”

“Can we eat the goddamn stew?” says Régis.

CUT.

Scenes from Milo’s nightmares. Lights glare, telephones ring, shrill voices vituperate. . Cars come to a halt in a screech of brakes. . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Car doors slam. . Milo, in an enormous train station, is grabbed, shoved, handled, dragged, manipulated by strange hands. . His head bangs into the legs of strangers. . a forest of legs. . Several superimposed speeds and rhythms of footsteps — heavy boots, ladies’ high heels, men’s city shoes. . Trains bang and clang, their steam hissing fiercely. . Telephones ring with insistence. . then leap off the wall and come to clobber him over the head all by themselves. . Ambulance and police sirens wail. . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Doors slam. . Women’s voices natter. . Bright lights come closer and closer. . WHITEOUT.

Sitting bolt upright, Milo chokes back a cry of fear.

“That goddamn Milo can’t let us get a good night’s sleep,” François-Joseph grumbles in his half-sleep. “Shut up, you little flea! Shut up! Will you shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake?”

Heaving himself out of bed, Jean-Joseph lurches across the room and swats Milo on the side of the head. To scare him, he clamps both huge thumbs on Milo’s gullet and makes as if to throttle him.

“Will you shut your goddamn trap?” he says, speaking in an enraged whisper so as not to wake the rest of the household. “It’s not enough we gotta hear about your good marks at school from dawn to dusk, no, you gotta ruin our nights, too, with your stupid squealing. You’re ten years old, for Chrissake! You’re not a baby anymore! If you don’t feel like sleeping, least you can do is piss off and leave us in peace, you little prick!”

Milo’s pulse flutters madly under Jean-Joseph’s thumbs. His arms and legs flail.

“Little prick thinks he’s better’n the rest of us,” mumbles François-Joseph, still in bed. “His mom’s a fuckin’ slut and he thinks he’s better’n the rest of us!”

Turning toward the wall he releases a long, loud fart. Jean-Joseph laughs. Releases the flailing boy and staggers back to his own bed.

“Your slut of a mother shoulda strangled you at birth. Woulda been good riddance, frankly.”

During breakfast, the phone rings and Milo jumps out of his skin. His cousins point at him and guffaw.

As Milo milks a cow in the barn, eyes closed, cheek dreamily pressed up against the animal’s flat brown flank, François-Joseph and Jean-Joseph sneak up behind him and set off an alarm clock—Drring! Drring! — then go into stitches when, leaping to his feet, stiff with fear, Milo upsets the milk pail.

Close-up on the frothy warm white milk, flowing all over Milo’s shoes.

Milo in bed at night, eyes on ceiling, afraid to go to sleep. Close-up on his face as he hears François-Joseph pad across the room and crawl into Jean-Joseph’s bed. . A series of rough, muffled sounds coming from that bed. . He sticks his fingers in his ears until it’s over. . but now he’s unbearably wide-awake. When the brothers start snoring again he rises, slips out into the hallway and tiptoes downstairs. In the living room, before turning on the TV set, he makes sure the sound button is turned all the way down. We watch him watching a 1930s movie—Hôtel du Nord, say, starring Louis Jouvet — with the sound off. His lips move. Approching, we realize he’s inventing dialogue for the film. .

(That’s when your vocation was born, my darling. I owe a great deal to your horrible cousins and your abominable aunt. Had they not tormented you, you’d never have become a screenwriter and I’d never have met you. Paul Schwarz’s life without Milo Noirlac — inconceivable!. .)

In his class at school, a girl starts smiling at Milo and casting him sidelong glances. Though only twelve, she already has generous bosoms and knows how to flaunt them, purposely making them bounce when she walks. At recess, she finds a way of slipping Milo a snapshot of herself. Turning it over, he reads: Je t’aime beaucoup! Edith. He looks up and flashes her the loveliest of grins. (You never had to pursue women, Milo, they always pursued you. That, too, must have contributed to your rare gift for inertia. .)

Now a double series of scenes in rapid alternation. No dialogue, only music; maybe early Beatles songs. . We’re in 1964.

Marie-Thérèse standing over Milo as he does his homework at the kitchen table and drilling him relentlessly, forcing him to take dictation. She has become his dictator.

Milo walking Edith home. When they reach her place, she leads him by the hand back to the woodshed and smilingly pushes him against the wall there. Then she presses up against him and glues her lips to his. Feeling what this does to him, his hands rise to her breasts of their own accord. He kneads them slowly and thoroughly, in a dizzy daze. Edith makes not the slightest move to stop him.

Marie-Thérèse shouts at him, testing his knowledge of French and berating him for every mistake he makes.

Edith puts her hands on either side of his face and shows him what a French kiss is. Pulls his head down and strokes his hair as he kisses her large, soft breasts through her thick sweater, first the left one, then the right.

Marie-Thérèse clobbers him over the head with the telephone.

Up in the hayloft with Edith’s picture, Milo pants and swoons in silence, coming divinely in the straw as the cows low quietly beneath him.

Walking home from school, Milo nearly gets hit by a car because he didn’t hear it coming. He lies awake at night with his hand over his left ear, testing — no, he can hear nothing in that ear.

SOUND IN: MILO and his aunt in the doctor’s office after his ear examination.

“This will help some,” says the doctor as he hands Marie-Thérèse a prescription, “but he’ll never fully recover his hearing in that ear. Make sure he avoids ear infections like the plague, or it’ll be total deafness.”

Marie-Thérèse is fairly bursting with pride: Milo has just skipped another grade at school.

“See? You’re top of the class! We’ll show them, won’t we, you and I?”

“I want a dog,” says Milo in a low voice.

“What?”

“I want a dog,” he says more clearly, staring out the window.

“You want a dog! Okay, listen. If you’re still top of the class on your next report card, if you get an average of more than ninety-five percent, I’ll buy you a pedigree dog. Is that a deal?”

CUT to a pet shop in a nearby town: Milo and his aunt choosing a dog together. Marie-Thérèse’s face glows with pride. She’s beginning to think her dreams for the boy’s future might actually come true.

“Whichever one you want, Milo. Choose whichever one you want.”

“Look. .”

Soft, fuzzy, furry, head like a bear’s head. Long, thick tail that drags or wags.

“Is that the one you like?”

“Yeah. You see? It’s mine. It recognizes me.”

Marie-Thérèse motions to the saleslady.

“What kind is this?”

“It’s a mongrel. Half German shepherd, half coyote. Not expensive; I can let you have it for ten bucks.”

“It costs what it costs. I made a promise and I intend to keep it!”

“Your little boy sure looks happy, anyway.”

Marie-Thérèse doesn’t correct the saleslady.

As they drive back to the house together, Milo ecstatic in the backseat with the dog, Marie-Thérèse glances at him in the rearview mirror and says,

“You’re more of a son to me than my sons are anyhow. What’re you gonna call it?”

“Oscar.”

“What?”

“Oscar.”

“Ridiculous. Oscar’s no name for a dog! Well, whatever. It’s up to you.”

“That’s right.”

Neil understands better.

“Oscar. . because he’s half Wilde?”

“Yeah,” says Milo.

“. . Like you?”

“Maybe. Only my wild half isn’t de one people tink it is.” Neil chuckles.

“You know, you’re right.”

A KALEIDOSCOPE OF scenes from the next few months: Oscar running after Milo when he leaves for school at seven in the morning, running to meet him when he returns at four. . following Milo as he gallops through the forest on horseback. . swimming with him in the nearby Lac des Piles. . waiting between his feet at mealtimes, swallowing the tidbits Milo slips him under the table — soundlessly, as both know it’s forbidden (one day Oscar forgets and his tail thumps the floor). . sleeping at the foot of his young master’s bed, front paws crossed, protecting Milo from the monsters in his room and in his dreams.

The kaleidoscope slows down, then zeroes in on. . boy and dog staring into each other’s eyes. We circle the pair. A lingeringly beautiful shot.

EARLY OF a summer evening. Milo sits on the porch next to Marie-Thérèse, helping her shell peas. They’re alone in the house. Suddenly she turns to him and says, so softly that he’s disconcerted:

“You know where the hunchback lives, Milo? About halfway into town. . You go past his house on your way to school.”

(Okay, Astuto, we can try to write this episode if you insist. . but I warn you, there’s a better than even chance we’ll need to excise it later. .)

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Could you deliver a message to him?”

“To the hunchback?”

“Yeah, look. I’ve got the envelope all ready. Just give him this and wait for his answer. And on your way home, here, take this. Buy yourself some bubble gum at the grocery store; you know, the kind with Beatles cards in it. But it’s just between the two of us, all right? I don’t want you blabbing about it.”

We follow Milo from a distance as, Oscar at his side, he jogs through the endless summer dusk, his red T-shirt a dancing splotch of color in the gathering shadows. Now twelve, his shoulders have broadened and his chest is growing muscular. . but still he is light on his feet, alert and supple. In his mind he replaces Marie-Thérèse’s droning, dictating voice with his mother’s soft, hoarse voice from long ago. You gonna have to resist, little one, she says. Be strong, be tough, don’t forget me. Other snippets of wisdom gleaned over the years he repeats to himself in her voice. Fear noting, son. You got de right to walk on dis eart’, just like de animals. Trust de animals — dey’ll never betray you — but beware of humans. Don worry’bout God or de Devil or what happen after deat’. Heaven and Hell are man-made and here on eart’. What will be will be. Respect nature. Respect your body, it’s a part of nature. Respect de ground you walk on. De sacred isn’t above you or below you, it’s inside of you and all around you. You’re a part of it, son. Praying’s a waste of time. Everyting you do, good or bad, is a prayer, so don’t let dem make you pray. When dey tell you to pray. . dream, little one. Dream. He goes up the porch steps and knocks on the door. On the mailbox is the name Bernstein. .

(No offense, Milo, but I’m afraid the spectators will simply refuse to believe that your aunt’s lover, out in the sticks of rural Quebec in the early 1960s, was not only a hunchback but a Jew. Yeah, I know it’s true, but that’s not enough of a reason. Sometimes reality just isn’t plausible. .)

The man who comes to the door is in his midfifties and crowlike: black-haired, black-garbed, beady-eyed, hunchbacked, hook-nosed, yellow-toothed. He must be rather sweaty, too, for Milo wipes his hand discreetly on the seat of his shorts after their handshake. Mr. Bernstein motions to the boy to sit down as he reads Marie-Thérèse’s letter, then brings him a glass of water to drink while he writes an answer. Milo is simultaneously curious and indifferent, attentive and uninvolved. (Your life philosophy was now firmly in place: you want to know, but. . whatever.)

Love letter in hand, he trots home in the dark with Oscar, stopping off at the general store to purchase, not a packet of bubble gum with Beatles cards in it, but a pack of cigarettes. He lights up as he walks. Practices being nonchalant about smoking.

Marie-Thérèse grabs him by the shoulders and sniffs at his breath. “Is that cigarette smoke? Don’t tell me you’ve started smoking. .”

Milo stares at her coldly. Her eyes drop to the ground.

Several such trajectories. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. One day, as he’s burying yet another statuette behind the house, he sees Jacob Bernstein, shoes in hand, climbing out of Marie-Thérèse’s bedroom window. The man heads for the road, tiptoeing absurdly through the high grasses in his sock feet and glancing about to make sure no one is watching him. His hunchback somehow makes his stealthiness even more ridiculous. CUT.

OVER THE COURSE of the next few years, Milo, you would piece together the implausible tale of your aunt’s love life. Long ago, at age sixteen, she’d gone to Quebec City to try to make a life for herself. She’d been hired as a servant by the writer and recluse Jacob Bernstein and the two of them had fallen head over heels in love. Horrified, Marie-Thérèse’s mother, Marie-Jeanne, had put her foot down. Are you out of your mind? A man twice your age? A hunchback? A Jew? You can’t be serious!

Eventually, reluctantly, the girl had obeyed her mother’s order to come home. She was devastated. Far from healing, her heartbreak had festered within her, making her tense, miserable and pragmatic. The following year, she had married Régis Dubé, the only one of her local suitors whose marriage proposal had included a diamond ring. They’d taken over the property and started a family together. And then, a mere few months after the wedding, Jacob Bernstein had bought a house in the area and the love affair had resumed. It had thrived — before, after and even during Marie-Thérèse’s pregnancies. With a rare gift for secrecy, the lovers had now been carrying on for nigh on thirty years.

Though you resented your aunt, Milo, you also respected her — for knowing about love.

• • • • •

Neil, 1918

ON ITS WAY to Liverpool, Neil’s ferryboat passes another, crossing the Irish channel in the opposite direction. On that boat, though he has no way of knowing it, disguised as a Red Cross nurse, is the formerly fiery, now aged and gaunt Maud Gonne.

She’d attempted to come back to Dublin back in February but had been promptly arrested, along with seventy-odd other nationalists including Countess Constance Markiewicz, and deported to England. Nine harrowing months at Holloway Prison have done considerable damage to Gonne’s health. She is emaciated and chastised, her splendid red hair has grayed — but today at last, after so many long years of exile, frustration and furor, Maud is coming home to Ireland! Her plan, naturally, is to head straight for her beloved apartment on Saint Stephen’s Green — loaned free of charge during her absence to her wonderful old friend, the poet William Butler Yeats. She has no way of knowing that Willie’s young wife, Georgie, is currently pregnant with their first child, and that Willie will refuse the returned exile entrance to her own home, for fear that she might infect the mother-to-be with cholera, curiosity, or politics. An unhappy ending indeed to the thirty-year friendship between gentleman poet and lady politician.

Neil, using his father’s money and connections for what he hopes is the last time, has papers forged for himself in Liverpool.

“Neil Noirlac,” he tells the man who runs the clandestine printing press.

“A French name you want, is it? For living in French Canada?”

“That’s right. I simply took the name of my hometown and exaggerated it a bit. Dublin means dark pool in Gaelic, Noirlac means black lake in French.”

“I see. Sumpin’ as if we were to take Liverpool, swell it up and turn it into Cirrhoselac?”

Neil gratifies the man with a laugh.

“Do you not want to change your Christian name while you’re about it, so’s they fit together?”

“No, Neil Noirlac is fine. I like the alliteration.”

“The what’s that?”

“Never mind. Another way of fitting.”

“’Tis as you please. Speaking of fitting, you’ve heard the one about the two Irish fairies, haven’t you? Gerald Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fitzgerald?”

(Of course we’ll cut that, Milo. Sorry. Terrible taste.)

* * *

. . And now he is on the steamer.

For nine endless days and nights, in the near-darkness of his cramped cabin beneath the deck, as the late-November storms buffet it from Liverpool to Quebec City, Neil empties the contents of his stomach. He brings up Trinity College, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, King George V and Archbishop Billy Walsh of Dublin. He pukes up Saint Stephen’s Green and the death of his cousin Thom. He rids himself of Daisy, Dorothy, his mother, his father, his former life, his former self and the very name Kerrigan—good word to say while vomiting — has a certain spitting-out quality to it.

YOU WANT THIS sequence to make us claustrophobic, Milo. Come to think of it, Neil must have accepted at least one more favor from his father. Who but that powerful magistrate could have secured him passage on this steamer from Liverpool to Quebec City. . or from Southampton to Montreal?

You don’t know much about this time in your grandfather’s life, Astuto, but it doesn’t much matter; the main thing is to have the camera show him, in his cramped quarters on the ship, sitting on the trunk that contains all his belongings, including the invaluable signed copies of Dubliners and The Wind Among the Reeds, and puking his guts up for three minutes straight. We don’t need to actually see or hear him doing this; we can guess at it from the heaves and tremors of his body. Meanwhile, in voice-over, we’ll hear him telling you the tale of his crossing thirty-five years later. .

ARMISTICE HAD BEEN signed a mere fortnight ago, and I’d managed to hitch a ride, as it were, on one of the first vessels bringing Canadian soldiers home. The troops were seriously thinned out: as they will teach you someday in school, Canada had left sixty-two thousand of her young men in the soil at Ypres and Verdun! As for my shipmates the survivors — exhausted, wounded, mutilated, mad — they were mere stumps of their former selves. But I wasn’t thinking about the soldiers, Milo. I was vomiting.

Though I grew up in the Bay of Dublin facing the sea, I’d never set foot on a real boat before. The Irish, you see, unlike the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Italians, are not seafarers. Over the centuries, the ocean has generally brought them bad news in the form of conquerors and marauders, so they prefer to turn their backs to it. Apart from digging up cockles and mussels along its edges, they have not tended to think of it as a source of amusement, discovery, or food. This is why, unbelievable as it may seem, when the Irish potato crop was wiped out by mildew in the mid-1840s, it did not occur to them to eat fish and a million of them starved to death. But I was not thinking of the potato famine as I crossed the Atlantic, Milo, I was too busy vomiting.

For more than a century already, Ireland had been degurgitating its own population. Puking up the poor. Heaving up the destitute. Splattering its ill and hopeless, ragged and starving masses all over the planet. Oh, Milo, the misery of my country is beyond belief! In a single century, that tiny island spewed eight million desperate human beings off its surface. How could there be any left? you might ask, and a good question it would be! The answer can be summed up in a single word: Catholicism.

Big families. Personally, I’d always suffered from having only one sibling, and an unpleasant one at that. I envied the James Joyces of the world, who grew up in the rough-and-tumble company of a large family. Ten young’uns there were in the Joyce clan — ten who survived, that is — of a dozen born! Only later did it occur to me that my mum must have had everything removed after Dorothy’s birth: in those days, Catholic families with only two children were unheard of.

Yes, British landlords were bleeding the country dry, but frustrated celibate priests tirelessly incited their overworked and undernourished parishioners to indulge in constant copulation so as to go forth and multiply. They painted hair-raising verbal pictures of what awaited married couples in Hell if ever it occurred to them to slough off on their conjugal duty and stop churning out kids: fallow wombs ripped open, lazy penises transpierced with pitchforks, unborn babes flung into cauldrons of boiling oil for all eternity. . Don’t forget, Milo — horror movies hadn’t yet been invented and neither had TV; people back then weren’t accustomed to digesting war footage with their evening meal. These images of Hell were very real to them. They stuck in their brains, tormenting their consciences by day and giving them bad dreams by night.

The Irish multiplied like rabbits and died like flies. Their country couldn’t feed them! They were packed half dead onto boats; droves of them died on the boats and got flipped into the sea; other droves made it to Sydney, New York, or Toronto and died there of starvation; those who made it to La Grosse Île, just upriver from Quebec City, turned out to be good at dying of cholera. This they did at the rate of five thousand a year for so many years that the island came to be known as Île de la Quarantaine. But still the Irish kept going forth and multiplying, hoping against hope that the next life might be better than this one, sure an’ nothing could be worse.

Oh, the poor Irish, Milo! An undereducated, gullible people, forever kowtowing to teachers and preachers, kings and popes, following their orders, fearing what they were told to fear, praying to the God they were told to pray to, abdicating their wills, allowing themselves to be downtrodden, endlessly cooperating in their own destruction. How I longed to help them! To write a book that would turn their resignation into some unprecedented form of intelligence! But now Ireland had spewed me up in turn. I was persona non grata in my own country, disowned by both the pro-British establishment and the nationalist independence movement.

So why did I never write that book, you ask? Well, my boy, little did I know it at the time, but I had come out of the frying pan into the fire. In Quebec as in Ireland, priests threatened married folk with hellfire if they did anything to avoid reproducing. In Quebec as in Ireland, women routinely gave birth to twelve, fifteen, or even twenty children, praying that half the swarm might stumble their way to maturity and that a precious one might enter the church. Oh, I hated those preachers with a vengeance, Milo, but I loved your grandmother. Being pious, Marie-Jeanne wouldn’t hear of abstinence or birth control; the minute each babe had finished suckling, she would come panting to me for more seed. Her thirteenth delivery killed her at age forty, and sorely do I miss her still. .

TERRIFIC, MILO — THAT’S a brilliant way of filming the ocean crossing. For once you’re thinking budget. No need to charter a ship or hire seven hundred actors to play the wounded, wild-eyed returning Canadian soldiers; the whole thing can be shot on set, in the studio. Brilliant. You deserve a kiss.

• • • • •

Awinita, July 1951

SOUND TRACK: IN the background, far away at first, the beating of Indian ceremonial drums. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. .

THROB-throb-throb-throb;

Is this throbbing a sound

Or an ache in the air?

Pervasive as light,

Measured and inevitable,

It seems to float from no distance,

But to live in the listening world—

Throb-throb-throb-throb-throbbing

The sound of Powassan’s drum.

Remember you read that poem out loud to me once, Milo, as we flew from New York to Bahia? Its author, Duncan Campbell Scott, was not only a great poet, but arguably the most ruthless throttler of native culture in Canadian history. In the 1920s, even as, in Salvador, Police Chief Pedro de Azevedo Gordilho was busy repressing capoeira, candomblé and sambistas, Scott ran all over Canada persecuting Indians and forbidding their festivals. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . White folks have always lived in terror of that sound. It’s the sound of their own bodies, their own desires, which they throttled centuries ago to become conquerors. . Sorry.

TA, TA-DA, DA, ta, ta-da DA. .In the foreground, so close as to seem to be coming from inside our very brain: zippers, belt buckles, the swish of pants being removed, a man breathing heavily, a man swearing under his breath, another man, another, another and, between pants, swearwords in English and in French, you little cunt, little slut, little slut bitch, belt buckle clinking, these sounds gradually fading and the drumbeats coming closer, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . zipper unzipping, a shout. You like it, don’t you? You like my big fat cock bangin’ into your savage little Indian pussy, don’t you? Come on, tell me you like it, you little whore. You like it, don’t you, eh, you fuckin’ little slut? Hey, little Indian, hey, baby, drumbeats getting louder, I’m gonna come, lemme come in your mouth, baby, can I come on your face, lemme come in your ass, baby, drumbeats now drowning the words out, yes yes yes YES oh my God, oh mon Dieu, oh oui oh oui ouh ouh, oui, OUI, the belt buckles, panting, pants, swish of pants and clink of buckle and zip of zipper ultimately rendered inaudible by the extremely loud drumbeats.

Awinita’s face (our face) reflected in a pond. We’re still only nineteen, but our expression is grave. As we stare at ourselves in the water’s still surface, our face sprouts long brown hair and laughs at us. Our body shrinks and we turn into some small, round, furry animal, maybe an ockqutchaun (woodchuck). Quivering, we bound away.

Awinita is fast asleep on Declan’s chest in the cruddy little bedroom above the bar. Half sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, Declan looks drunk and in an evil mood.

“Nita,” he says (but she’s breathing from the depths of sleep). “Nita!” he repeats, stubbing out his cigarette and jerking her to wakefulness.

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

She doesn’t answer. Wouldn’t know where to start.

“Ever since the baby was born, it’s as if you don’t wanna make out with me anymore. Come on, whassup?”

“It’s only been a coupla weeks, Deck. I’m tired, dat’s all.”

“We used to have such good times in bed, baby. Come on. . Make an effort, honey. . Make me happy.”

“I’m tired, Deck.”

“You make your johns happy all night long, no problem there, no I’m tired there! Just suddenly when it’s my turn, the tap runs dry.”

“Later, sweetie.”

“Don’t you later-sweetie me. You know we gotta clear outta the room by noon, and I’m not allowed in your place up on the Plateau. I don’t like this, baby. I’m not gettin’ any and it pisses me off. I’m a normal guy with normal needs and you’re my gal, remember? Maybe you get your kicks elsewhere, but I sure as hell don’t. .”

“Lemme sleep, man. You should get some shut-eye, too. You had too much to drink.”

Turning her back on him, she pulls the sheet up over her shoulder. He rips it away.

“Don’t you tell me what to do, bitch. You’re not my mother.” He moves onto her.

“Hang on, Deck. . you wearin’ a safe?”

Large animals — oxen? — writhing in agony. Their bulky bodies heave, they bellow.

Awinita in the apartment on the Plateau Mont-Royal, chatting with her roommates. One of them — Deena, a young Mohawk Indian from the south of the province, also a bleached blonde — always gives her beauty tips.

“Wow, Nita. You should get your hair done, you know that? Your roots are really visible.”

“Yeah, I’ll get around to it. Soon as I’ve paid off my debt.”

“I’ll be all paid up a month from now,” says Cheryl. “Got a terrific weekend job up at that new hotel near Trois-Rivières, Le Paradis des Sports.”

“Lucky you! How’d you land that?”

“Owner was in town coupla weeks ago. Guy named Cossette. Musta liked the way I went down on him.”

“You’re goin’ up in the world, with all that goin’ down. Wow! Put in a good word for us, Cher!”

They laugh.

“Sure thing. Uh. . Actually they say they don’t want native girls, to start out with. . But at least you’re working again, Nita. That’s amazing. Got your figure right back, eh?”

“Yeah, nobody’d ever guess you just had a baby just three weeks ago!”

“Not even floppy around the tum.”

“Hurts, dough,” Awinita says.

“What hurts?”

“Work.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Lorraine who is older than the others, twenty-five or so. “Been through it twice.”

“I never had a baby, but I can imagine.”

“Your johns notice anything?”

“Nah. . but I do.”

“Well, tell ‘em to be nice ‘n’ gentle with you.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Awinita, and the four of them laugh.

“You know what the best painkiller is, don’t you?” Lorraine says.

“Uh. . love?” says Awinita, and the four of them laugh.

“Nope. Cold as ice. Keep guessin’. .”

“Aspirin?”

“Better’n love, but still barely lukewarm.”

“Poppers?”

“Gettin’ warmer. .”

CUT to Awinita and Lorraine locked into the bathroom together. Subjective camera: we’re seated on the toilet lid, our face visible in profile in the mirror above the sink. Close-up of a needle slipping into a vein in our inner arm.

“It’s a gift, Nita. Won’t cost you a cent, this first time. Just a gift, to make you feel better.”

Close-up of our face in the mirror. Slowly its muscles relax, its tensions dissolve, its contours fill with bliss. They melt and fade to whiteness. . Yes, the divine milky whiteness of heroin you know so well, Milo, darling, and which you’ve always longed to convey on film. We could put Arvo Pärt’s Litany on the sound track. Our eyes close, our lips and mouth go slack and we sink deeper and deeper into the liquid ecstasy, floating in it as we did in our mother’s womb, hearing the soft throb of our mother’s heart, which is also our heart and that of Mother Earth, that Indian drumbeat we recognize from before. . Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . As our flesh melts and the universe dissolves around us, we nod off, our forehead pressed against the bathroom sink, but even that chill hard edge is a pleasure as exquisite as the first spoonful of vanilla ice cream on the tip of our tongue when we were three years old. Our hand falls off our lap, our arm flops to our side and dangles there. We open our eyes long enough to see Lorraine smile down at us and move away. . CUT.

Awinita has gone home for a visit.

Full summer sunlight glancing off the high blond waving grasses of the Waswanipi Reserve, uncultivated land as far as the eye can see. She walks past the old folks sitting on benches beneath the eaves of their miserable huts. As they gaze after her, we see their brows knit at the way she walks and the way she is dressed. Their disapproval isn’t about her being a prostitute; it’s about her being a city chick, a stranger. Her demeanor can’t fit in here anymore. The community is losing its members one after the other, a slow hemorrhage.

In the shade behind their shack, she sits down with her mother, a hunched and wizened woman of maybe forty-five. Their conversation will be in Cree with English subtitles.

“Many moons it’s been,” says her mother, plaiting sweetgrass.

“Yes. Too long.”

“And the envelopes stopped coming. But now you’re here and it’s better than many, many envelopes.”

“I had debts to repay. Life will be easier now, I hope.”

“Difficulties come to us all, we face them. Your body is strong?”

“My body is strong. The brothers and sisters?”

“There was hunger this year in springtime, but none of us died. Life thrives. The world follows its course. And we must all go back to the earth our mother, who patiently waits for our time to come, her arms wide to welcome and hold us.”

“Yes. When there’s more money, I send it to you.”

“If you have extra, send it so I can buy more flour.”

“Now I must go back to the city. The trip is a long one; night will be day before I arrive.”

“Be joyful.”

“Take advantage of life.”

Gently, unsmilingly, the old woman presses the braid of sweet-grass into her daughter’s palm. Awinita rises and moves off. And, as the punishing sun finally starts to set. . CUT.

A series of toilet scenes, still and always from Awinita’s point of view.

Seated on the throne of a toilet, now at Liz’s place, now in the cruddy bedroom on Saint Catherine, we wipe ourselves and twist around to check the toilet paper. It comes up bloodless.

Time after time after time, we swivel to find no blood.

Close-up of our impassive face in the bathroom mirror. Our hair is now half blond, half black.

Sound track of men groaning and muttering, panting and swearing, zipping their flies up and down, unfastening and refastening their belt buckles.

A frog tries to leap out of a well. It gathers tremendous energy for each leap but never manages to reach the top. After each failure, it finds itself back where it started, only tireder. Sometimes it bangs its head on the stone wall, but it can’t help leaping; its urge to reach sunlight and fresh air is irresistible. At last it weakens and sinks beneath the water’s surface. There is light there, too, but of a different kind. A still, glazed-green light shrouds the frog.

• • • • •

1. Who gets your heart, baby, after nine?

Is it mine, is it really all mine?

When I’m away, do you toe the line?

Who gets your heart, baby, after nine?