Black Dance

VII. MALANDRO

Milo, 1967–70

UPON RETURNING TO the farm after Oscar’s death, Milo goes into a black hole and stays there. Weeks, months maybe — he loses track of time. Goes through chores and homework, robotlike. No one can reach him.

Neil is worried—Won’t you come up and read with me, Milo? — no, he will not, not yet. He needs to swathe his being in protective robes of silence and shadow, plunge into somber splendor, the closets of his early childhood, the blackout screen at the end of TV movies, and also, when summer finally rolls around again, the deepest, darkest water at the center of Lac des Piles. .

(I’m seeing more and more clearly that what you love when you love somebody are that person’s loves. Loving you, Milo, means loving your love for Oscar. Neil. Lac des Piles. .)

On the far side of the lake is an Anne of Green Gables sort of house — Milo has swum across to it several times. A cushy green-and-white summer cottage with a glassed-in porch, property of a wealthy gay movie producer by the name of Sherman Dyson. As wealthy gay movie producers were an exotic species in rural Quebec back in the mid-1960s (and who could have guessed that you yourself would one day fall in love with just such a creature?), every aspect of Dyson’s identity was an inexhaustible source of gossip in the area. His wealth aroused people’s envy, his homosexuality their sarcasm, his profession their reverence. . and no one knew what to make of the fact that, the previous spring, he’d gotten married. The bride was rumored to be a good deal younger than he, and a model, and a looker, so it may not be far-fetched to suggest that Milo’s powerful crawl- and breast-strokes across Lac des Piles, that summer after Oscar’s death, took him with perhaps unwonted frequency in the direction of this particular summer cottage.

And indeed, one day. . there she was.

A dream scene. The young woman has her back to him when, approaching shore, he first catches sight of her. Her skin is tan, her hair blond and wavy to mid-back, and she is clad in a mere idea of a white bikini. Arriving in shallow water, Milo takes great splashing steps to conceal the rise of desire between his legs. Hearing the swoosh of water, the young woman turns and appraises him with a smile. She doesn’t flinch or blush or flee. At fifteen he is fully formed, and what she sees coming toward her is not a tall, skinny, gangly teenager but a solid, sturdy, brown young man, water running down his chest and thighs as he advances, rilling over his shoulders from his black-auburn hair (long and thick in summertime).

“That was quite a swim,” she says when he’s within hearing range. “I’m Kim.”

At once, to Milo’s ears, Kim is the sexiest name in the world. Its resonance vibrates with crème and chrème⁶ and whim and brim and sperm, all the way to his balls.

“I’m Milo,” he says.

And the dream continues, the dream continues, Kim takes his hand and leads him across the patio and into the elegant green-gabled cottage. By the time his eyes grow accustomed to the penumbra, the two of them have already floated through the kitchen into the bedroom, the young woman is already helping him remove his trunks and guiding him onto the bed and taking his astoundingly outstanding member in her hands. . Close-up on the boy’s expression, surprise then deeper delight as a woman’s mouth voyages him toward a new universe of pleasure, and when, not much later, his virginity gets lost in a rush of joy manyfold richer than anything he’d concocted with the help of Sophia Loren or Edith or the cows, Kim kisses him tenderly on the lips.

“Thank you, baby,” she says breathily. “You’re as marvelous as you look. . I needed that. You wanna meet my husband?”

Ever willing to deal with what life chooses to dish up to him, be it rape at the hands of a lumberjack cousin or enchantment in the arms of a blond model, Milo slips his swimming trunks back on and pads after her. Dyson’s office is next to the bedroom and the man has been there all along in a big leather working chair, reading a magazine and puffing on a cigar. Kim makes the introductions with graceful arm movements.

“Sherman, Milo. Milo, Sherman.”

“You speak English?” Dyson asks as he shakes hands with the strapping boy, and then, when Milo nods, “Know anything about gardening?”

“I know vegetables better dan flowers, but I learn quick.”

“He learns quick,” Kim confirms, repressing a giggle.

“Okay, you’re hired.”

CUT to a series of scenes from the remainder of that unforgettable summer of 1967 in which, day after day, Milo acquires the basics of horticulture and eroticism in languorous alternation: we see him trimming hedges, sculpting rosebushes, mowing the lawn, adding fertilizer to flower beds, and learning all about patience and perseverance in his amorous acrobatics with the older woman. Kim teaches him that there are heavens beyond the first, and that even the seventh is not the last. .

(I must say I’m profoundly grateful to Kim Dyson. Sexually speaking, your kindergarten was pretty atrocious but your grade school was top-notch. Few men are so lucky as to have had a kind, skillful, affectionate professor to initiate them into the subtleties of physical love. After a few weeks, the professorship turned into a tandem: Sherman joined the two of you in bed. And your luck back then, Astuto darling, has been mine these three decades. .)

Marie-Thérèse is incensed at what she divines is going on across the lake. . but every time she opens her mouth to light into him about it, Régis stares her down and she clamps it shut again, for Milo is suddenly making a significant contribution to the household finances.

Having few outlets for her fraught feelings toward her nephew, Marie-Thérèse goes back to (bong) hitting him over the head with the (bong, bong) telephone receiver. He lets it happen. He doesn’t much care. The world is rife with dangers. There are aunts who wield telephones, bears whose powerful arms and chests can crush the air from your lungs, snakes whose venom can stop your heart, wolves whose teeth can tear you limb from limb. You need to know about the world’s dangers and protect yourself. Milo covers his ears to prevent Marie-Thérèse from doing further damage to his hearing.

One day, though, her words pierce through the cotton fleece of fog in his brain and hit him in the heart:

“You ungrateful brat! You evil seed, you good-for-nothing! I wish I’d never agreed to take you in! You love the gutter, it’s in your blood, your grandfather should have left you there.” (Bong!) “I was going to have a house built next door just for you, a nice place you could live in when you grow up. But if you wanna fritter your time away, all right, fine, no point my breaking my back to make something out of you! Go join your slut of a mother and your delinquent of a father on Saint Catherine Street! That’s where they made you! Go ahead, go back where you belong, no skin off my back!” (Bong!)

He carefully stores in his memory the words Saint Catherine Street.

Just before summer’s end, Marie-Thérèse hits upon the only punishment that can really get to him: she has found him another boarding school.

“A real Catholic school, this time,” she declares.

“You mean,” says Neil “. . with morning and evening prayer, catechism and confession, the whole kit and kaboodle?”

“Yes, of course! The kid needs to be taken into hand. He’s the only one in his class not to have been confirmed yet. We have to straighten him up. .”

On the eve of Milo’s departure, Neil summons him to his study.

“It hurts me, my boy, to think of you struggling with the selfsame soul fetters as I did at your age. . But no matter what they do to you, don’t go to confession. Tell those meddling priests that what goes on in your body and soul is none of their flaming business! Here, put these in your suitcase. These three small volumes will stand you in better stead than a thousand prying priests.”

The books are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

THE ENSUING YEAR can be compressed into a single minute: We see Milo attending catechism classes. . using a photo of Kim — and memories, ah memories — for his solitary pleasure. . hiding Homer’s Odyssey behind his geography book when he’s under supervision in the study hall. . especially playing hockey. Reviving skating reflexes learned years ago with the Manders family, he throws himself into the game with a vengeance, passing the puck, swerving on the ice, moving strong and low and fast, skating backward, forward and sideways, scoring point after point. . but eschewing rowdy displays of comradeship, never letting the other players, with their enormous gloves, thickly padded knees, shoulders and groins, bobbing helmets and clacking sticks, throng round to hug and pat and jostle him when he scores, preferring always, when not on the ice, to wait alone in the rafters reading Don Quixote. . We see him in church, with Othello hidden inside his hymnbook. . using a photo of Jane Fonda in Barbarella. . kneeling at the altar to take communion with twenty other boys. . striking up a conversation with a boy he sees reading Aeschylus and Euripides in the library — a shy, overweight, devout, bespectacled, pimpled adolescent whose nickname is Timide. Kneeing the testicles of a tall, blond, snotty student named Augustin, for having teased Timide. . sitting across from Timide during meals in the large dining hall and making him explode with laughter, scattering crumbs in all directions. . teaching Timide to smoke without coughing and to fend off the insinuating words and fingers of the priests. . Stealing extra food from the kitchen so that he and Timide can snack in the dorm at midnight. . descending deep into himself so as not to feel the pain when caught and whipped by one of the sisters. . gluing samples of leaves and flowers into his botany album, labeling them carefully and showing them to Timide. . stealing wine from the chalice in church and sharing it with Timide. . being dragged to a confessions box on a Friday morning. .

Here we can zoom in on his dialogue with the priest.

“What did you do, son?”

“None of your business.”

“This is serious, Milo. I’m asking you if you’ve sinned in thought, word, or deed.”

“And I’m telling you to mind your own business. No way I’ll ever tell you what goes on inside my head.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way to a man of God, Milo.”

“I didn’t ask to talk to you.”

“You’re under our authority here; you can’t do just anything you please.”

“Neither can you!”

“If you go on talking that way, my son, I’ll have no choice but to punish you, you realize that?”

“I’m not your son, for Chrissake!”

“And on top of it all you take the name of Our Lord in vain!”

Milo detests priests and finds it hard to tell them apart. They all seem to wear the same glasses, have the same phony smile, the same cruelty masquerading as virtue. . Preferring brutality to hypocrisy, he’d rather deal with his cousins any day.

The holy sisters drag him out of bed before dawn and force him to wax the hallway or sprinkle the skating rink for two hours. But he sleeps little anyway, and would rather wax a floor or sprinkle a skating rink than have nightmares. He finds the work soothing, does it carefully and well. Loves being alone. The sisters yank him away from early Mass and send him down to the kitchen to make toast for 150 breakfasts. . But he can dream while making toast — far better than in church, where organ music, incense smoke and priestly prattle clog his senses within minutes.

Throughout the long winter months he deals patiently with his fate. But as April begins to wane, as the snows melt and the river ice breaks up and the sluices open and the juices run, an atavistic urge rewakens in his veins. . and, suddenly, no. No. None of this. He must be gone.

In the dorm one night at half past twelve, he sneaks over to Timide’s bed.

“You awake?”

In his upper bunk, the fat boy flops over and struggles to focus.

“Here. Put on your glasses, we’re hightailing it out of here. Just you and me, okay?”

“Where to?”

“Montreal. Get dressed.”

“Montreal! You must be nuts! It’s a hundred miles away!”

“Take your blanket and stuff a few clothes in your knapsack. I’ll wait for you in the hall. It’s the perfect night, there’s a full moon. Everyone’s asleep. .”

“Everyone but the wolves.”

“You and I are the wolves now. Come on, Timide, get your ass in gear!”

As Timide reluctantly descends from his bunk, Milo notices Augustin, the tall blond snotty boy, archest of his archenemies, feigning sleep in the bunk below. Has he overheard their plans?

Hiking Timide’s pudgy, clumsy, terrified body over the high wall of the institution is no mean feat, but Milo is all-powerful tonight. Free! Free! his mother’s voice sings softly in his brain. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . By one in the morning they’re on the road: full moon, springtime, owl calls, river thundering down below, good graveled road underfoot. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Milo’s knapsack is packed tight with food stolen from the kitchen and his heart is high with hope.

Timide’s step, however, is less buoyant.

“What are we gonna do in Montreal?”

“Find my mom.”

“I thought you were an orphan!”

“No, my parents are alive, I just haven’t met them yet. But I know where my mom lives, on Saint Catherine Street. We’ll surprise her. You’ll see, she’ll be thrilled! And then she’ll help us out. . But first we’ll stop off at the house of a girl I know.”

(This next scene, Milo, is one of the least glorious episodes of your life. .)

Two or three days have elapsed, and while Milo’s enthusiasm is unabated, Timide is in bad shape: exhausted, sweating, smelly and scared, his feet covered with blisters. The runaways arrive at Edith’s place after dark.

“Where’s your friend?” whines Timide.

Milo pulls him around to the back of the darkened house and picks up a pebble. CUT to Edith at the window. At sixteen as at twelve, what she lacks in beauty she makes up for in warmth.

“Milo, wow! This is fantastic! The police are looking for you guys. My parents heard about it on the radio. They’re combing the whole area. And here you are, wow! Hang on, I’ll be right down!”

CUT to the woodshed half an hour later. A flashlight propped amidst the stacks of wood and kindling gives the place an eerie glow. Edith, dressed only in a nightgown, drops to her knees on the dirt floor and slowly bares her breasts. Timide’s eyes pop out of his head. He backs away in terror, repeatedly making the sign of the cross and whispering, “Non, non. .” but Milo constrains him, gently pushing him forward.

“Look, Timide. . Look how beautiful they are. . Come closer! See the way a girl’s nipples harden when you stroke them real gently?. . See? Come on, give it a try. . Hey, you’ve seen titties before, haven’t you? You sucked your mother’s titties when you were little like everybody else! It’s okay to like it, you know. .”

Edith laughs. She draws the two boys toward her, then purposely falls over backward so that Timide finds himself on top of her, his face squashed between her breasts. He jerks away, beside himself with fear. Edith laughs again.

“Hey, take it easy, big boy! I won’t bite!”

“N-no. . n-no. .”

“You getting hard down there. .? Nope. . soft as chicken liver. Don’t you know a thing about love, hey, Timide? Watch your friend Milo, he’ll show you the ropes. .”

And Milo, whether as a grotesque reenactment of the previous summer’s antics with Kim and Sherman or an involuntary replay of his violation at the hands of Jean-Joseph, tries to include poor Timide in this his first copulation with Edith, forcing the boy despite his tears and protestations to remain not only with but virtually between the two of them as they work themselves up, Milo’s boots scrabbling amidst rakes and brooms and Edith’s head banging up against the logs, Milo’s hips thrusting and Edith’s heaving, Milo’s throat emitting grunts and Edith’s squeals, finally attaining orgasm (Milo’s) in the sawdust.

When Milo comes to his senses, Timide is sobbing uncontrollably.

Edith helps the two of them to their feet and dusts them off, then hands them a box of cookies and a tin of sardines: “This is all I could find.”

CUT.

A long, depressing shot of the two boys walking through forest in silence: “I’m sorry, Timide. . I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

CUT TO: The boys’ dead campfire early in the morning. They’ve spent the night huddled against a hillside. As chill dawn whitens the sky, Milo scrambles to his feet.

“Let’s go,” he says, bending over the bumpy lump that is Timide’s body. “Today’s the big day.”

“Let me sleep, you bag of shit!”

“No, let’s go. Come on, Timide, let’s go. This is no time to fall apart. We’re almost there, I can feel it. Can’t you? Can’t you feel the big city right nearby? Come on, get the hell out of bed or I’ll finish the trip without you!”

As there’s nothing Timide dreads more than finding himself alone in the middle of nowhere, he angrily rises and gets dressed. The boys scramble up to the crest of the hill. . And there it is, shimmering and scintillating in the pink-mauve softness of the spring dawn, white ribbons of smoke rising from its chimneys and early sun rays glancing redly off its skyscrapers, rippling down from the mountain at its heart to the river whose long arms hold it in a tight embrace, stretching beyond mountain and river as far as the eye can see: the island city of Montreal.

Awed, Timide and Milo lie flat on their stomachs and gaze down at the unfathomable cement-and-glass beast.

“There’s my mother,” says Milo, stretching out an arm. “See? I told you we’d make it! She’s right there.”

The following second, in close-up, we see his body snap into a state of unbearable alertness. Pressed against the earth, his skin and flesh have sensed the vibration of a motor vehicle. Now his rearview vision records the silent blue flash of a revolving light. . and before Timide realizes what’s going on, the two of them have been roughly cuffed and shoved into the backseat of a police van.

HOW SHOULD WE film your jail stints, Astuto?

The nice thing about prisons as compared with closets is that you get to meet other prisoners. It was within the walls of that juvenile detention home that you first met and talked with Indians. At school you’d learned oodles of things about the British and the French and their proud, heroic, capitalist descendants in North America. . but about the native inhabitants of this land? Nothing but colorful shreds of phony folklore. The more Indians you met, the madder you got. Never in human history, it seemed to you, had a people so utterly accepted its defeat. The problem was that in addition to having had their land stolen and their way of life destroyed, Indian men had seen their youngest and prettiest women snatched away by swarms of ugly, aggressive, bearded, foul-smelling, land-hungry, profit-seeking white men — who, moreover, having crossed the ocean womanless, were as horny as bulls — so that within a couple of decades there was a huge métis-blood population. Undone, Indian men had basically locked themselves away for the past three hundred years in a resentful, alcoholic silence. Yeah, I know, Milo, protests and petitions by native Canadians managed to make a few improvements in the second half of the twentieth century, but basically it was way too little way too late. .

WE COME UPON our hero in his grandfather’s study. Close-up on his face at age sixteen: detention has changed him.

“So they put handcuffs on you, did they?”

Milo nods.

“A surprising sensation, isn’t it? Unforgettable.”

“You were arrested once, Grandpa?”

“I was, yes. But I was a grown man by then, several years older than you are now. You’ve always been precocious, eh, whippersnapper? First you skipped two grades at school and then you skipped straight to the juvenile delinquents’ home, without even stopping off at reform school along the way.”

“Dey’re talking of sending me to a reform school now.”

Neil puffs away at his pipe and rocks in his rocking chair, taking his time. Both men are happy and neither is impatient.

“What did you do, Grandpa?”

“We’ll come round to that. I can see why you ran away from that boarding school, Milo, given the punishments they’d been inflicting on you.”

“It was your fault.”

“Oh, yes? How’s that?”

“I talk back to de priest who ask me to confess.”

“What did you tell him?”

“None o’ your flamin’ business!”

“Ha! Good for you!”

Another pleasant pause. Neil knocks the burned tobacco out of his pipe into an ashtray. Refills the bowl with fresh tobacco from a green leather pouch Milo has always loved, tamps it and lights it with a taper drawn from the fire in the fireplace. Sucks slowly and sensuously at his pipe, causing not only the tobacco but the light in the western sky to smolder.

“And you stuck with your young partner all the way, did you?”

“. . Yeah.”

“That’s the main thing, to be trustworthy. To stand by those who’re counting on you. The worst crime isn’t robbery, Milo. If it were, all of our political leaders would be in jail. The worst crime is treachery, for that is a crime against one’s own soul.”

“What did you do, Grandad?”

“Well, you remember I took part in the Rising in Dublin, at Easter 1916. I was a member of the Irish rebels, who’d just then begun to call themselves Sinn Féin. Now, my cousin Thom and I were posted at the entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green, a lovely park in the city center. And on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, who should come striding toward us but Major John MacBride. The major was on our side, but he was also the sworn enemy of Willie Yeats, who for years had been in love with his wife, Maud Gonne. You remember my telling you about her?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, Milo’s Mighty Memory! Well, MacBride knew me to be a close friend of the poet’s. Running into me at Saint Stephen’s Green, he suddenly saw his chance of getting back at his rival. . and he denounced me to the Brits!”

“How’d he do dat?”

“Well. . as the son of Judge Kerrigan, you see, I’d normally have sided with the Empire. So the rebels had decided to use me to infiltrate the enemy ranks and find out what the Brits were planning. I was wearing a British uniform. Can you believe, my boy, that in April 1916, while the First World War was raging across the Channel and all their military strength was needed to fight the Germans, the British deployed forty thousand troops in the city of Dublin?”

“So, uh. . was Thom a spy, too?” asks Milo.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you. He was dead by then.”

“What?”

“Yes, a frightful event. The Brits shot him point-blank before my very eyes. But I don’t want to bore you with my veteran’s tales. Suffice it to say that having been denounced by John MacBride, I was arrested, handcuffed, dragged off to Dublin Castle and held in custody there for two long weeks. Had my father not intervened, I should have met with the same sorry fate as the other heroes of the day. Yeats’s famous poem would have been called ‘Seventeen Men’ instead of ‘Sixteen Men.’ A different rhythm indeed!”

“What? Dey put you in jail for two weeks and you almost got shot by a firing squad and you never told me about dis before?”

“I thought I should wait until you’d reached manhood, Milo. Now that you’ve been behind bars yourself, I think you can understand.”

“Den I can tell you what I did when dey let me out last week,” Milo grins.

“What did you do?”

“Well. . when I first got locked up, I tought we were denounced by de blond kid, Augustin his name was, who used to bully Timide and always had it in for me. But my friend Edit’, she come to visit and tell me it was Timide himself who call de cops from a phone boot’, one day when my back was turned! Dat explains why he went straight back to school when we got busted, and I got locked up. So. . first ting I do when dey let me out, I give Edit’ a call. . She borrow her mom’s Volkswagen and drive me all the way to de school. When we get dere, I crawl in de back of de car and crouch down on de floor to wait. .”

(We can do this scene in flashback, with you telling your grandfather the story in voice-over. Of course you neglected to mention what you and Edith had done to Timide in the woodshed on the way down to Montreal. .)

“Finally Timide, he come out to smoke on de front steps with Augustin and a coupla oder guys. I’m de one taught him to smoke!. . I can see he’s de big school hero now, moved way up tanks to his week’s adventure running away wit me. Edit’ call out to him. Hey, Timide, baby! Wanna go for a spin? He hesitate. He still shy, but he want to show off in front of de oder guys. In that jalopy? he say, stalling. Tought you might like a change from lookin’ at priest bums! Edit’ say. So Timide say okay. He come over, get into de passenger seat, Edit’ step on de gas and de car leap away from the kerb. I got my arm round Timide’s troat fore he know what happening. His mout’ pop open and I stuff my handkerchief inside. We drive out to de reservoir. I got a baseball bat in de trunk. We drag Timide out of de Volkswagen and I smash up bot’ his knees.”

“Y-you did?” gasps Neil, swallowing. “The-then what did you do?”

“We drop him at de hospital.”

Milo and Edith shove the broken boy out of the car onto the sidewalk, near a sign that reads HôPITAL SAINTE-MARIE.

“Well. . that’s fine, then,” says Neil, clearing his throat. “Long as you dropped him off someplace he could be taken care of. . You’re right, traitors deserve to be punished, as Polonius tells his son Laertes when he goes off to university. You remember that soliloquy from Hamlet, don’t you? Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.”

Milo takes over.

Dose friends dou hast, and deir adoption tried,

Grapple dem to dy soul wit hoops o’ steel

But do not dull dy palm wit entertainment

Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear’t dat de opposed may beware of dee

“Impeccable!” Neil says, enchanted with his scion. “But my most important advice to you, Milo, comes still and always from Yeats.

How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no solitude?

“. . Never fear solitude, Milo. In this time of political turmoil, beware of Loud Speakers. Remain ever a student.”

CUT.

Ripping him out of his reverie, the guard suddenly comes and clangs on the bars with his billy club:

“Telegram.”

Milo’s eyes focus. “Yeah?”

“It’s not mail day but we decided ta do you a favor.”

“I don’t need your favors.”

“Okay, you can go to hell.”

“Give it to me.”

“Oh, so you want it now? Say please. .”

At lightning speed both Milo’s hands are through the bars and around the man’s throat.

“Hand it over or you’re dead.”

“Bloody savage,” says the man, handing him the telegram. .

(Yes, okay, Milo. The telegram can only be from Marie-Thérèse’s daughter, your cousin Marie-Gabrielle. Though she was closer to you in age, only four years older, she didn’t play as important a role in your life as your male cousins, so I figured we could save a few thousand dollars by leaving her out of the story. But you’re right — no one else in the family could have sent you this message, so we’ll have to go back and put Marie-Gabrielle in everywhere. .)

GRANDPA NEIL DIED IN HIS SLEEP ON WEDNESDAY. HIS FUNERAL TOOK PLACE YESTERDAY, IN THE SAME CHURCH WHERE HE MARRIED OUR GRANDMA FIFTY YEARS AGO. THE CHURCH WAS ALMOST EMPTY, NOBODY KNEW HIM ANYMORE. IT WAS SUCH A PITY NOT EVEN YOU WERE THERE, MILO. WHEN WILL YOU BE GETTING OUT THIS TIME? YOUR LOVING COUSIN, GABRIELLE

The prison gives Milo a day’s leave. We see him heading home through the forest at nightfall. His nose catches a scent. He tenses, then breaks into an animal run. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Sound track: no panting, only his steps thudding softly on the forest floor, like the soft beating of a drum. In the distance he sees white smoke billowing above black trees. Not the house. Behind the house. He goes around. A towering bonfire. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. . Jean-Joseph is tossing armloads of books and papers out the window of Neil’s study on the second floor. François-Joseph is deftly catching them and adding them to the high, hissing flames. Both are singing, laughing, roaring drunk.

Milo turns on his heel and vanishes.

In the morning, after walking past the smoldering, smoking, stinking mound of ashes that was once his grandfather’s library, he bursts into the kitchen where his aunt is making hotcakes. As usual, her first reaction is to yell at him.

“Where have you been, Milo? The boys saw you arrive last night. You sneak up on us like that, you don’t say a word to anyone and then you vanish. We looked for you everywhere!”

She catches sight of his face and her tone changes. There are now large amounts of air between her words.

“What. . what’s wrong with y. .”

Milo goes over to the drawer and takes out the sharpest knife.

“Milo. . you’re upset about the fire, is that it?”

He approaches, wielding the knife, expressionless.

“It was just books, Milo!”

He advances on her.

“It was just books! Milo! What was I supposed to do with them? And besides, they were all in English!”

He pushes her up against the wall. Raising the knife, he looks calmly into her eyes.

“Régis! Help!”

The knifepoint comes to a hovering halt a quarter inch from Marie-Thérèse’s chest. Then Milo turns and plants the knife with all his might in the exact center of the maple wood table. His mother wouldn’t want him to spend the rest of his time on earth cooped up in lawcourts and jail cells. She’d want him to be free.

“You’ll see me again when you’re dead,” he says.

The knife is still vibrating when he slams the door and walks off the Dubé property for the last time.

• • • • •

Neil, 1920

SEPTEMBER. SLANTED SUNLIGHT. Maple trees aflame. Breathtaking beauty of the Quebec countryside during its brief autumn. The camera pans across the Chabot property (familiar to us as the Dubé property from forty years later) to a woodshed, its door open a crack. Sliding through the crack along with the sunlight, we fall on a page of Neil’s notebook. Uneasily perched on a stack of old apple crates, the writer is trying to write. We’re reminded of a similar scene in his Dublin bedroom a few years ago. . but his inner voice is even more anguished now than it was then. As Neil works on his text about exile, the camera glides through the woodshed and enters a vaster, barnlike space, lit in chiaroscuro by flashes of sunlight coming through small windows. There, it explores an enigmatic concatenation of tables and woodstoves, vats and tubes, bottles and utensils — not the laboratory of a mad scientist, but the ordinary paraphernalia required for the manufacture of maple syrup.

The thing about exile, Neil begins in voice-over, is that it forces you back into childhood. Even the first time around, being a child was mostly unpleasant. As soon as you can think, you are painfully conscious of being smaller and weaker than the powerful, prestigious giants who surround you. They despise, dominate, manipulate and look down on you. You are impatient to grow up, break free of them, become your own man. Thus, it is confounding and humiliating, at nearly thirty years of age, to find yourself, as it were, back at square one again. If your exile includes a language change, your sense of stupidity and helplessness will be compounded. . no, compound rhymes with confound, let’s say aggravated. . no, exacerbated. . no, aggravated. . by your lack of proficiency in the new tongue. You get by all right in private conversation with your loved ones, for loved ones tend to be indulgent. . but when you are obliged to deal on a daily basis with a large group of people, well acquainted among themselves and accustomed to communicating through quirky colloquialisms, inside jokes, onomatopoeia, muttered prayers and blasphemies, you suffer not only as much as but more than a child — for, unlike the latter, you have no hope or even wish of attaining proficiency in the local idiom. . It is most exasperating. I love Marie-Jeanne, but. . No, cross that out. This isn’t my diary, it is a personal reflection on the universal theme of exile. . Brought up in the city, you find yourself in the country. Armed with a law degree from Ireland’s finest university, you are suddenly being instructed in the fine points of making maple syrup. Formerly on intimate terms with the greatest poets and novelists of the day, you now prefer the company of cows to that of what passes, locally, for humanity. . No, that’s too nasty. After all, there were peasants in Ireland, too; I simply didn’t frequent them. I fought for their rights, of course — indeed I risked my life doing so — but I did not have to eat, drink and sleep with them, put up with their pungent body odors and their primitive sense of humor. New paragraph.

Tolstoy in no way jeopardized his literary greatness by cutting wood with his muzhiks, because he did so on his own property, in the country and the language of his birth. He was not hampered and handicapped at every step by foreignness, but remained master of the situation. The violent changes inflicted by exile plunge you back into the immaturity and dependency of childhood. They turn you into a mumbling, stumbling, stuttering nincompoop, incapable of running your own life. Bad enough for the common mortal, this state of affairs is disastrous for the writer. In the space of a mere few days — the time it takes to travel from the Old Country to the New — he very literally loses the ground beneath his feet. His pen’s feverish activity is turned to ice by a series of paralyzing questions (I can correct these metaphors later): Who are my readers? Who are my characters? What is my subject?

Since crossing the Atlantic, I’ve met precious few people who ever heard of the Liffey, the Easter Rising, Padraic Pearse or Major John MacBride; French Canadians care not one whit about the Irish rebels, Sinn Féin, or the act recently passed by British Parliament allowing Protestant Unionists in the North to retain control of the six counties of Ulster. My country is splitting in two, Good Lord, and so is my head. . Mrs. McGuire told me that here in Montreal in 1916, only a couple of months after the Easter Rising, there was an anticonscription demonstration at the Place des Armes. The French Canadians didn’t want to be enrolled in English Canada’s war — which is to say England’s war — any more than the Irish did. Mrs. McGuire can see the analogy because, like me, she has a foot on either side of the ocean. But if my future reading public is made up exclusively of Irish-born residents of Quebec, what stories can I, should I, must I tell? I’m losing my stories! They’re dying on my lips!

Just as Neil tearfully scribbles in his notebook They’re dying on my lips! we hear a blood-curdling female scream. The camera rushes back to film him as he leaps to his feet and bolts from the woodshed, letting pencil and notebook tumble to the floor.

CUT to the bedroom in which Marie-Jeanne has just given birth to their first son. The mother is still flat on her back, but the child has already vanished. Several devout, efficient females — her mother, a couple of older sisters or cousins (he can never keep them straight), a nurse and a young midwife named Marie-Louise — rush to and fro, taking care of everything in French.

Neil has become a stranger in his own home. No, it is not even his own home. He has become a stranger, period.

“Is it a boy?” he asks timidly from the doorway, not quite daring to cross into the room.

“Yes, sir,” says Marie-Louise as she strides down the hallway, arms piled high with bloody sheets. “Yes, it’s a little boy. Mrs. Noirlac wants to name it Pierre-Joseph, after her father.”

Neil winces.

CUT to that evening: At last the little family is alone together. The baby sucks fiercely at Marie-Jeanne’s breast, and her face is suffused with light.

“All men are Joseph,” says Neil.

“What, darling?” says Marie-Jeanne. “What are you mumbling in your beard?”

“All men are Joseph,” he repeats. “Every childbirth is a Nativity, know what I mean? It’s between mother and child. I sit here looking at the two of you, and you shine so brightly it makes my eyes hurt. Joseph is irrelevant. It’s obvious he can’t be the father.”

“Neil!” says Marie-Jeanne with a laugh like the soft jingling of sleigh bells. “Don’t tell me you think I cheated on you!”

“No, but our baby’s the child of God. It’s a miracle, every childbirth is a miracle. Joseph has nothing to do with it and he knows it. He sits there in the stable, feeling silly and out of place. . Uh. . anything I can do to make you more comfortable, dear? Want me to smooth out the hay under your rear end?”

“What are you trying to tell me, sweet Neil?”

“Nothing, just that. .”

Moving over to the window, Neil stares out into the gathering dark.

“All I’m trying to say is that. . I’m somebody, too.”

“What do you mean? Of course you’re somebody!”

“I mean, I make an effort, I do my best to adapt, to learn everything there is to learn about maple trees, spruce trees, moose and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. . but I, too, come from somewhere, for the love of God! I, too, have a past, a history. . I don’t want for my whole life to be drowned here erased and replaced by yours. . So all I’m asking is that you take one little step toward my own history.”

“What kind of step? Oh! Did you hear that? He burped!”

“Leave me the boys.”

“Sorry?”

“We’ll divide the children up between us. You’ll take the girls, choose their names, talk to them in French, bring them up to be nice little Catholic women from Quebec. . and I’ll take the boys: Irish names, English language and a lay education.”

Marie-Jeanne looks at her son, her husband, her son. She loves Neil with all her heart, but dreads her father’s ire.

“Otherwise,” says Neil, raising his voice, “if everything I’ve ever been and done gets wiped out, I don’t know how I can ever be a man in this household, much less a writer. Please understand me, Marie-Jeanne: I can’t create works literature if I feel I have no heir, no hope of passing on my lore and learning.”

Marie-Jeanne is still hesitant. Neil tries another tack.

“Besides, the sad truth of the matter is that anglophones earn a better living in Quebec than francophones. They’re the ones who run businesses, they’re taking over the pulp-and-paper industry. . The future is anglophone. If you want our sons to make something of themselves. .”

“Well, okay,” says Marie-Jeanne with a sigh. “I have to admit I can see your point.”

“So this one won’t be named Pierre-Joseph, okay? He’ll be named Thom.”

“. . All right.”

CUT to a close-up of a tiny coffin being lowered into a tiny grave. Drawing back, we see a few dozen members of the Chabot family gathered in the town churchyard, their faces glistening with tears. Neil hugs Marie-Jeanne to his side. The camera moves back in to read the words engraved on the tombstone: THOM NOIRLAC. 3 SEPTEMBRE 1920–17 SEPTEMBRE 1920.

• • • • •

Awinita, September 1951

TOTAL DARKNESS. BLACK screen. It’s four A.M. in the cruddy bedroom above the bar. Declan’s speech is distinctly slurred (so to speak).

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. . I promise you, Nita. Sumpin’ll turn up.”

“You already said dat.”

“I know, but this time I mean it. Soon’s our baby’s born, I’ll clean up my act.”

“Dat’s a whole six months from now, Deck.”

“Yeah, but jobs are always scarce in September. My chances’ll be better in the spring.”

“Why’s dat?”

“I heard tell.”

“Where’d you hear tell? In jail?”

He hits her. We don’t see the blow, only hear it, and Awinita’s yelp of indignation.

“Hey! Shit, Deck!”

“Don’t talk down to me, Nita. With seven sisters, I had enough o’ women talkin’ down to me since I was born.”

“Yeah? Well, I had enough o’ guys hittin’ me.”

“That’s not what they do to you. They screw you. Every Tom, Dick, ‘n’ Harry’s got the right to screw you. I’m the only who has to ask permission.”

“Least it makes you special. . You oughta be grateful to ‘em for screwing me. It’s deir money you live off.”

“Oh, thank you, Tom! Thank you, Dick! Thank you, Harry! Specially Dick. Thank you for fuckin’ my wife, you great big Dick!”

LIGHTS (Awinita has just turned on the bedside lamp).

“I not your wife, little boy.”

We’re in her eyes, in her body, when Declan’s fist makes contact with her jaw. The blow sends us careening backward to stare at a corner of the phony oakwood headboard.

“Fuck, man. Ya broke my fuckin’ jaw.”

“Did I?”

Declan is sincerely shocked.

“I tink so, asshole. . You’re destroyin’ your only source of income, you know dat? Who gonna come upstairs wit a girl got a twisty purple face?”

Declan breaks down. Blubbering drunkly, he kneels at the side of the bed and covers his face with his hands.

“I’m so sorry, Nita. I’m. . so. . sorry! Can you ever forgive me? I’m so, so sorry I hit you, Nita, you’re pregnant with my baby. . I’ll never lay a finger on you again, I swear it. I solemnly swear I’ll never lay a finger on you again. Oh, Nita, can you ever forgive me?”

His shoulders heave, and tears come trickling through his fingers. We put a hand on his head and, sobbing, he buries his face between our dark breasts.

“I’m out of sorts ‘cause I went home over the weekend. . hitchhiked all the way there. . Thought everybody’d be glad to see me. . but they didn’t give a fuck. . Didn’t pay me any attention. . I’m used to Marie-Thérèse being nasty, but this time it was especially. . my da. He lit into me, called me weak and spineless. . Said I had no gumption, no political convictions, nothin’. Said I was wasting my days on earth. How can a da talk that way to his son, Nita? I’ll never talk that way to my son, I can tell you that. . He called me spineless, Nita! My own da called me spineless!”

Gradually his sobs space themselves out and, with his head still weighing heavily on our chest, he begins to snore.

An X-ray image of Awinita’s spine, perfectly straight and normal. But suddenly her vertebrae turn into red balloons. They swell and expand until they literally become her, and the rest of her body is awkwardly curled up inside the colored, bobbing balls.

Awinita’s apartment on a Friday morning; Liz is staring at her.

“. . You pregnant again, Nita?”

“. .”

“Hey, Nita, don’t tell me you’re pregnant again. Don’t tell me.”

“I didn’t.”

“Sweetheart, that’s bad news. You know that?”

“Yeah.”

“You want me to give you the address of somebody who. .”

“Nah, it’s a’right. . I like de guy.”

“You’re not supporting him, I hope.”

“Nah. . Well, a bit. Just till he finds work. I don’t give him much.”

“Listen, Nita. If I were you, I’d get rid of that baby before it’s too late. Your credit’s running out. If you’re not careful, you’re gonna find yourself in the street. And a pregnant Indian whore in the street, I don’t need to tell you that spells trouble. Sweetheart, you wanna get married, settle down and have seventeen kids like those rabbity French Canadians, go right ahead! It’s no skin off my back, just so long as you pay me back what you owe me. I got plenty of hot young babes just itchin’ to take your place. You met Alison yet, by the way?”

“Who’s Alison?”

“Moved into your room yesterday. She’ll be sleepin’ in Cheryl’s bed, seein’ as how Cheryl found herself a cushier job out at Trois-Rivières.”

“I tought dat was just a weekend gig.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t do part-time, Nita. You’re either with me or you’re without me. Is that clear?”

“Sure.”

“Then toe the line, I’m warning you.”

CUT to the girls’ bedroom.

Alison is a thin, fragile-looking Haitian girl, clearly a novice. Lorraine and Deena giggle as they teach her the ropes.

“It’s nothin’, man,” says Lorraine. “Don’t worry. I mean, what’s a dick, right? To them it may be the be-all and end-all, but to you? Nothin’ at all!”

“Yeah,” Deena chimes in. “Dicks come and go, you know what I mean?”

The two of them cackle wildly.

“Dat ain’t true,” says Awinita from where she’s standing in the doorway.

“Huh?” says Deena.

Awinita looks at them impassively, not moving. Speaks simply.

“I tought it was notin’,” she says, “but it ain’t. You take deir dick, deir pain comes along wid it. Dey leave de pain behind. Dey go off, and de pain stays behind wit you.”

FADE TO GRAY.

Amidst moving shadows, a monster shakes in evil, soundless laughter. Other shapes surge and swarm before our eyes, shivering darkly. There is a shooting star.

Maybe that shooting star is you, Milo darling? Maybe it’s your soul suddenly entering your body? Awinita has just passed the critical three-month point of her pregnancy.

• • • • •

6. cream. . chrism