Life in the Court of Matane (8 page)

Back then my grandmother used to sing along to a Gilles Vigneault album she was especially fond of. In all objectivity, her rendering of
Les gens de mon pays
was much more convincing than the original. A beer would suddenly appear, never turned down by my father, and soft drinks flowed freely, setting off a much more serious discussion of the burning issues of the day. A heartless neighbour had put up a damned shortwave antenna, scrambling the radio reception, much to the chagrin of my grandmother, who liked to fill her home with music. A lamb my grandfather was raising in the shed behind the house now weighed over forty pounds. My great-aunt Jeannette from Manitoba had written a letter warning us not to seed too early, a warning that had to be taken quite literally since everyone knows that Canada's west is the testing ground for the seasons in the east. And so we learned, without having to say a word, the teachings required to survive this land: beware your neighbours, the ideal weight of a sacrificial lamb is close to forty pounds, and summer comes from Manitoba. After these initial lessons, it was time to sit down at the table, on grandfather's orders, before we collapsed with hunger. The table was besieged, and the barley soup just waiting to be served and gobbled up.

Since we're already up to our haunches in folklore, allow me to let you in on a little secret: before turning to farming, my grandfather was a lumberjack. One day in Germany, I said that to a table of very well-dressed people eating fries.
Mein Gro
β
vater war Holzfeller.
They laughed. I don't think they believed me. It was too much. And yet the photographic proof exists. There is a photo of him somewhere in the snow, on a horse the foremen gave him for chopping down a record number of trees.

Apart from on New Year's Day, when we asked my grandfather to bless us, he never felt compelled to stoop so low as to speak. We knew him as a big softie who bawled with emotion on New Year's at the sight of us all together or who cried his heart out because one of his sons had missed the occasion. His big failing was a love for the god of plenty. Visits to him had to be made on an empty stomach. “EAT!” was an order to be obeyed, even on your deathbed. My grandfather was an eater. Calories were his ultimate goal. Hunger was a priority, and his every action was dictated by the next meal. People said he got that way after growing up hungry in a very poor family, where supper often consisted of a boiled turnip shared between seven. The turnip had usually been stolen from a neighbour's field and was chewed in frustrated silence. My great-grandfather eventually wound up buying a plot of land and some animals, bringing the food shortage to an end. Since I first heard the story, eating turnip has become akin to partaking in the Eucharist for me. I eat turnip like Jews eat matza, the unleavened bread that Moses ordered them to prepare before leaving Egypt, to remember harder times. I eat turnip in solitude and in darkness. Its bitter taste and slightly stringy consistency are nothing but a polite reminder that I am only one generation removed from hunger. I usually eat it during Holy Week. Every bite turns my stomach, but I finish my plate in silence. Sometimes I even go back for seconds, which I eat pinching my nose and with tears in my eyes, in memory of the bleak land that is eastern Quebec. One day, some folks from Montreal, very educated, very kind anglophones, invited me round to eat. It was a fancy lunch in the rich part of town. Four courses. It was, if I'm not mistaken, also Good Friday. A few repugnant chunks of turnip floated in the soup. Extreme poverty had managed to sneak its way into the homes of Westmount to remind me of something or other. To work, to never give up, certainly, but more importantly that life would never let me forget that my grandfather went hungry. That I would carry this hunger within me for all eternity. That it would never be sated. That every meal offered only brief respite from the burning pain of the starving man. Each little piece tasted of destitution. The turnip is particular in that it whets the appetite of those who eat it. To eat turnip is to eat humanity and all its suffering.

My grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had learned that it was best to keep farm animals on this barren land. First he raised cattle like everyone else, then when his children started to leave the family home, he got rid of the farm. Although he did keep a shed for the chickens, rabbits, and occasional lamb until he could no longer move around easily. He showed off his animals with pride and clung to them desperately. They no doubt reassured him when he saw prices go up at the supermarket. He was aware of his dependence on them. The rest of the family explained to us that he kept this harmless little farm for want of anything better to do, to find work for idle hands. That seemed unlikely to me. He could just as easily have carved dining-room furniture out of wood, grown vegetables, or gone off on his moped to pick berries along the country roads, all favourite pursuits of his. Instead, my grandfather looked after his farm animals and tended a vast garden after the trauma of famine. A man who was once hungry for days hankers for the company of chickens and rabbits. Where others saw feathers and fur, he saw a meal. For him, there was no such thing as leisure time. It was all about calories. For him, the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade signalled the start of berry-picking season. He picked strawberries in June, raspberries in July, and blueberries in August. Bucketfuls that my grandmother made into pies and jams. He had no time for tourism, sport, music, or any of the other things that put nothing on his plate or were simply a distraction from calorie production. Every spring, my grandmother would have to beg and cajole him to let her take over two small rows in the garden where she could grow her gladioli. “If not for him, I'd plant flowers everywhere and get rid of the vegetables altogether,” she confided in me. He looked down on her gladioli and would go on and on about how you can't eat flowers, as he angrily hoed between his yellow beans.

It was nice to see him work. We admired him, not only for his enthusiasm and steadfast determination to be at one with nature, but because he didn't even have all his fingers. He had lost four or five of them, playing with dynamite by all accounts. It came as a surprise the first time you saw his maimed hands. Then, as we got to know him, my sister and I came up with all kinds of cockamamie reasons why he might have lost his fingers. He had lost them in a war. A rival had cut them off in a battle. A wolf had torn them off in a fight to the death. He had fallen asleep on a railway track. The idea of my grandfather “playing” with dynamite as a child surprised me. I had never thought of dynamite as a toy before. I secretly envied my grandfather for having lived through wild times, back when you were allowed to have fun with explosives.

Sometimes, some unfortunate soul would visit my grandfather for a very special form of treatment. He knew how to rid the body of warts, you see. I never saw him in action, but it seems that he spoke to them quietly to persuade them to leave. I have no data on the effectiveness of his approach. Patients nevertheless continued to show up at his door. I often amuse myself imagining what he might have been saying to the warts. I came up with all kinds of lines, from the vulgar to the poetic. A healer, a carpenter, a farmer, and a prankster, my grandfather made up for his lack of education by never boring a soul.

It was a happy coincidence that our Easter visits always coincided with the sugaring-off season. While we were there, young countryfolk would often ring the doorbell to offer us maple products at rock-bottom prices. My grandfather would then set down his pipe on his ashtray mounted on a moose leg (I think Henry VIII might have killed the animal out hunting one day), stand up, and break his silence. The little salesgirl, inevitably a very distant relation of ours, would leave the house twenty dollars richer. He would buy maple syrup, taffy, and butter indiscriminately. Then he would sit me down with my sister on a bench, put the small end of a huge funnel in our mouths, and empty into them the entire contents of his purchase. “Eat!” He didn't care if it was eleven in the morning or two in the afternoon. I suspect he lost sleep worrying that my sister and I might be going hungry. He took “I'm full, thanks” to mean “I'd love another four slices, with potatoes if there are any left.”

Sitting with my book in my grandparents' living room, I learned that the cowbird's eggs are sometimes chucked out of the nest. The opposite is also possible. Sometimes the squatter, once hatched, gets rid of the other eggs by puncturing them. The little parasite nestling, often bigger than the others, eats the food destined for its adoptive brothers and sisters, effectively starving them to death. I looked at the king and queen in my grandfather's company. I wondered if there were any cowbirds in Saint-Antonin. There had to be, according to the map in my book. They must arrive by the dozen every spring. In the Saint-Antonin forest, there must have been many nests with squatters in them. Soon, pairs of warblers, jays, and buntings would be discovering unknown eggs in their nests, eggs that they would decide to either keep or get rid of. The travel sickness was gone now. The sound of washing-up in the kitchen brought me back to reality, far from birds that relied on others to raise their young.

The table was set, and no one was going to turn down Grandma's humble invitation to sit down for “nothing special.” Back then, she still cleaned the local branch of the credit union every morning, while my grandfather's broad farmer's body occupied the rocking chair that looked out over the St. Lawrence Plain. We imagined that during the two hours it took Grandma to dust the credit union (
Le souci de l'épargne épargne les soucis
, it said, on the tiny pencils she gave us), nothing worth writing home about ever happened in the house. But that particular Good Friday made us realize we should treat calm and silence with the wariness normally reserved for tax returns.

That Good Friday, we found my grandfather home alone. Before inquiring about our health, the state of the roads, or the weather over in Trois-Pistoles, he of course wanted to know if we were hungry. Grandma still wasn't back from the credit union and had asked him to stir the soup and wait for us. Simple enough instructions, but not the type you give to a prankster like him.

The soup was ready by the time my grandmother got back. We were waiting for her to come home before we sat down to eat. I have no recollection of my grandfather handling kitchen utensils, nor of the important place that Catherine of Aragon had occupied in his heart, a place that none of the string of women my father had paraded in front of him over the years had ever managed to win over. Perhaps that affection had stemmed from the fact that my grandfather and my mother worked together at different ends of the calorie supply chain? He in production and she in processing. Was he, too, aware of the risks associated with uttering her name? What I was told years later was that he was very fond of Micheline Raymond, professional cook. She had lived with them back when she was very young, and pregnant with my sister. After the birth of this first child, my mother had stayed in Saint-Antonin with Henry VIII for a while. An acrylic painting of a spray of flowers hung on the living-room wall, a sign of the time my mother spent in my grandparents' life. It was there. It would have been burned in Matane. It was signed “Micheline” in black. Censored art in my grandma's living room.

The soup went down slowly and noisily. Barley soup, it was. The dish that transcends all social classes. The soup that's served on Tuesday afternoons and on Christmas Day alike. The soup that soothes an entire country. And the preparation that went into barley soup, that, too, bordered on the sacred in our house.

Steam rose from the soup pot. My grandmother's clock struck twelve. She arrived just in time for the meal, delighted to be served for once by her husband. We reached the bottom of the first bowl. Everyone complimented my grandmother's soup. Even though we ate the same soup all the time in Matane. Henry VIII was respectfully submissive in front of his parents, which was touching to see. Anne Boleyn, for her part, was all “Madame” this and “Monsieur” that, language usually reserved for official protocol. When she finished her bowl, she nibbled on a meat-covered bone. “The chicken is delicious.” Grandma bristled. “Chicken in my soup?” Anne Boleyn wondered if she had mistaken the animal. “What do you mean, chicken in my soup? On Good Friday?” Back in 1979, serving chicken on Good Friday in a respectable household in Saint-Antonin was akin to serving ham sandwiches with mustard (non-kosher mustard) at a Jewish funeral reception. Anne Boleyn was left with the unpleasant impression she had said something foolish. Grandma flew into a panic. She jumped up, dashed into the kitchen, grabbed the saucepan, poked around with a ladle, and, to her horror, discovered a piece of meat. The ladle fell from her hand. Grandad, meanwhile, winked broadly at my sister and me and gave us a sly smile. The cheek of it! In the argot of pranksters, a wink meant that an atomic bomb was about to be dropped. Grandma wanted to know
right this minute
what a piece of meat was doing in the soup. This was no laughing matter. There had better be a good explanation. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn set down their spoons. I went on eating. The king smiled awkwardly. He knew his father, and what was coming wouldn't be pleasant. For some, at any rate.

The presence of poultry in the barley soup that Good Friday, 1979, was explained to us in an old patois that is no longer spoken. Grandad laughed as he spoke. He was relying on two thousand years of patriarchy, which forbade any questioning of a father's decision. It was quite simple. He had been rocking himself as he waited for us, looking out over the plain, slightly bored. But, as you know, boredom is not permitted in Saint-Antonin. A bird with iridescent feathers was perched on the washing line. Grandad decided to take out his shotgun. He took down the bird in the middle of its Good Friday chirruping. The bird was plucked and cleaned. Then popped into the barley soup to cook, flying in the face of every precept of the Holy Catholic Church. So there you had it, that was the Quiet Revolution. It was my grandfather who insisted on serving Anne Boleyn a wing from the brown-headed cowbird. This was a man who, for his whole life, rejected the metric system and degrees centigrade, to remind us all where we came from. He was Charles Baudelaire's owl who refused to move.