“Eh, what? Elmer Lach’s here?”
On the ice, however, the Canadiens and Arvidians were now enjoying themselves, fellow feeling having come to the fore with Claude Hardy’s departure.
They celebrated until late, legends and stars together. Rémy Bouchard was awarded the game’s first star. As is often the case with true heroes, Hardy fêted his exploit all alone at home, banished from the party thanks to his Homeric, moronic gesture. The local paper the next day paid tribute to the evening overall, while censuring the lapses in sportsmanship early in the match, and the shameful conduct of the organizer.
A low blow Pitou never forgave the journalist, not to the day of his death on December 4, 2010.
*
The next year, my grandfather went to consult his doctor for a pain in his thumb, and learned that he had contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative disease that would carry him off sooner or later. He wept a lot, and spent much of his time over the following years sitting in an armchair kneading his rosary. It’s said that a little boy stayed near him all the time, and helped him to find the right position on a cushion where he might rest his stiffened ankles. I have no memory of this, but the little boy was me.
He died in 1981, not having forgotten to remind all and sundry that his condition, in the United States, had another name: Lou Gehrig’s disease. What killed my grandfather had also killed the New York Yankees’ iron man.
My grandmother was the sole inheritor of the house and her ailing son. She’d never drunk a drop in her life, but in secret she’d taken to downing great glassfuls of whatever was at hand, taken from the bar at any time of day. I know that, because she often babysat my brother and myself, and her eyes were no longer sharp enough to see me hidden beyond her peripheral vision. She liked watching over us a lot, my grandmother. She cooked as if trying to fatten us up, but as we were running around outside all the time, nothing stuck to our bones. At noon hour on school days, we went to her house to eat a quick sandwich, and to play cards.
She called my brother, whose eyes are not green, the little man with apple-green eyes. She called me her angel with horns.
In the winter of 2001, my father ran for councillor in Arvida in the municipal elections. He’d set up his campaign office in the abandoned locale of the Orlac Jewellers on Davis Square, right beside the Arvida Brasserie. Pitou Parent was the informal strategist and press attaché. The last weekend before the vote, my Uncle Clinton picked me up on my way down from Ottawa. Then, passing through Quebec City, we picked up my friend Phil Leblanc. Clinton’s plan was to go door to door with my father, canvassing the old Arvida families. For Phil, me, and Marc Laganiére, who was waiting for us on site, it was a matter of phoning people on the list whom we were likely to know, from eighteen to thirty years old.
Things didn’t go very well, and this is not a story I enjoy telling. It was a dismal end-of-winter, the lawns were yellowed, and everything and everyone was drenched in a scuzzy drizzle. My father had lost about thirty pounds, and was as nervous as a cat. He took me into a corner to hand me a little jar of medicine, nitro pills that our seventy-year-old friend Ti-Bi had given him, totally illegally. My father told me that I had to quickly slip a pill under his tongue should he have a blackout, something that had happened once or twice during the campaign.
A single photo remains from that lost weekend, showing us sitting around a table, Clinton, my father, Marc, Phil, and myself. Pale from the winter and ashen from fatigue, bags under our eyes and our hair in a mess, we look like vampires. I mean real vampires, out of an old Slavic legend from before there was printing.
Strigoi sitting around a forty-ounce bottle of Chivas Regal.
On election Sunday, in the evening, I took my place as scrutineer at the Sainte-Thérèse neighbourhood polling centre in the Saguenay Valley School’s tiny gymnasium, just a few steps from my grandmother’s old house. The results were not good. I left before the last ballots were counted. I knew perfectly well that if the situation was so bad there, at the heart of our territory, it would be disastrous elsewhere. And it was. My father had to shoulder two jobs for a year to pay back the costs of his campaign.
I brought my bad news to the headquarters with little hurried steps, under the rain. I crossed Boulevard des Saguenéens and the lawn of the Notre-Dame-du-Sourire primary school, trudged through its gravelly playground and up the old coulee path, before coming out beside the Palace.
In that landscape of my childhood, I told myself that I would never again confuse the mythic Arvida, over which my family had reigned in my dreams since 1947, with the municipality of the same name, in the Saguenay.
Here, I mean there, we were kings of nothing, princes of our sorry backsides.
In many respects, the exile had begun long before.
In 1993 my grandmother left the Saguenay and returned to Beauport, from which her sisters had never strayed very far, and where her son Georges and his wife Maud were then installed.
The last time I saw her was in 2002. She was in a hospital room in Quebec City, and was not wearing her glasses. As in an old engraving, she was staring with bulging eyes at the emptiness over her bed, as though an incubus were hovering there with its black wings spread wide. The hospital was one of those beautiful old Quebec buildings that take you back in time despite yourself, with ghostly good sisters coming at you around a bend in the corridor, and visitors wondering whatever happened to their hats and their gaiters.
It was winter, and I have no memory of the view from the window. Perhaps the curtains were drawn, it seems to me that it was very dark. We’d spent the afternoon there with my aunts Lise and Hélène. Both of them doctors, they were engaged in an ongoing struggle with their male colleagues to have the doses increased. Those men no longer went to Mass or crossed themselves when a priest passed by, but curiously, they still believed that there was some grace to be found in suffering.
At one point, a lovely nurse about forty years old, energetic and sexy, came into the room to adjust my grandmother in her bed and to see if everything was going well. She tried to make conversation with her by asking her who were the people with her. My grandmother pointed to my aunts, saying with pride that they were her two daughters, both doctors.
The nurse added:
“And those two handsome boys, who are they, Madame Archibald?”
My grandmother stared at us for a long time, as if she’d never seen us in her life, and she said, in a panic:
“I don’t know, my grand nephews I think. Or little cousins.”
My Aunt Lise laughed nervously.
“No, mama. They’re David and Sam, Dougie’s sons.”
My grandmother put her hand to her brow and said she was tired. She then shifted her gaze to the unseen exterminator perched over her bed. She breathed a long sigh.
My Aunt Hélène, a lung specialist who nevertheless shared our nicotine addiction, took us aside and said: