“I love it here.”
“Yeah, ‘sokay.”
“Want some?”
“Tanks. .”
“I really only feel at home in nature, you know? I’m a country boy at heart.”
“So what ya doin’ in de city?”
“No jobs in the country.”
“You got a job now?”
“Nah. Prefer to live offa you.”
He laughs, she doesn’t.
“Awinita. .”
“Yeah.”
“Since. . I mean, since you’re planning to give the kid up for adoption anyhow. . why don’t we. . like, go someplace together? I mean. . why don’t we just leave Montreal and go live out in the forest someplace, make a life for ourselves? Awinita, come away with me! We’re both young, we can start over.”
“Start what over?”
“Whatever! We could buy a stand of maple trees and learn how to make maple syrup. .”
“Buy it how?”
“You ain’t got any savings?”
She says nothing. We remember the tin-roofed shack, the packed dirt floor, the weeping family.
“Your dad didn’t leave you any money when he died?”
Again she says nothing.
In front of them, an Indian man of forty or forty-five, his body transparent, is bent over the water’s edge. He’s holding something in his hands, but we can’t see what. Suddenly he smashes it on a rock and tosses the pieces into the air. They fall — heavily at first, like gold nuggets, then gently, like raindrops. The drops disturb the still pool. The man gradually dissolves.
“Your dad’s de one who got money,” she says at last.
“Only hitch is, he disowned me.”
“How come?”
“Third jail sentence, he got fed up. I disappoint him, Nita. Seems like none of his sons turned out the way he hoped. He wanted us all to go to university. Workin’ on the land is beneath us, he says. Back in Ireland he was a lawyer, his dad was a judge, his friends were a buncha famous writers. .”
“So how come he left?”
“Somethin’ happened during the First World War, I don’t know what. Maybe he refused to be drafted by the British, somethin’ like that.”
“Dey drafted Indians from here, too,” Awinita murmurs, but Declan doesn’t hear her.
“He came to Canada, found himself a nice plump Québécoise to marry. Then she started churning out babies and he worked his ass off on her father’s land. If I heard it once I heard it a thousand times: twenty years of backbreaking labor in Pierre-Joseph Chabot’s foresting industry. . all the while clutching at his dream of getting a novel published. After a long day’s work on the property, he’d sit up reading and writing in his library late into the night. When his folks died, he had eighteen boxes of books shipped over from Dublin. And that still wasn’t enough. Every time he went to Montreal or Ottawa he’d come home with a fresh armload of books. Plays, poetry, first editions. . But Neil, darling, what good will all these books do us? I remember my mother saying. We can’t feed our children with poetry! Truth is my mom was slightly pissed off ‘cause she’d grown up in the sticks and wanted out of them. Ran away to Montreal at age eighteen to become an actress, landed up waiting tables instead, in a coffee shop on Notre-Dame. That’s where they met. So she was none too thrilled when he insisted they head back to the sticks. She figured if she had to wade through cow and baby dung from morning to night, least he could do was shut up about Shakespeare. He used to corral all his sons into his study every Sunday morning, read out loud to us in English from these ancient books, stuff about Greek wars, British kings, whatever. I learned to hate that library of his. The girls meanwhile, being francophones, would be off at Mass with our mom. . She died giving birth to her thirteenth baby and, being the oldest girl, Marie-Thérèse took over. She raised us with an iron hand, that’s for sure, but she couldn’t change our father’s ways.”
We gently leave the ground and go wafting up in the air to join the gulls wheeling above the Saint Lawrence. We fly through our own long, undulating hair. . But as we move through it, it begins to wrap around us — more and more tightly — until finally we’re nothing but a hard little ball of hair. We bounce.
“When I was twelve or so,” Declan plunges on, “my da got a package in the mail, a signed copy of a book by some Irish writer with a woman’s name. . Janice or some such, I forget. The book was a mishmash of foreign words and hard words and nonwords, as if the guy’d taken a big stack of books from all over the world and tossed them into a pot and made a stew of them, then ladled the stew onto the pages. . After about an hour of listening to that horridge-porridge, I got mad. How dare my father waste my time with this when I had stuff to do, buddies to see. . That day, I swore I’d never be caught dead with a book in my hands. My brothers musta done the same ‘cause none of us ever made it past junior high.”
“Not so different,” Awinita murmurs in her husky voice.
“What’s not so different?”
“You.”
“From what?”
“My johns.”
“Thanks!”
“’Sokay. You’re a guy, and guys like de sound of deir own voice. Hey, gotta get back to work.”
• • • • •
IV. MALÍCIA
The very essence of capoeira, malícia allows you to see the darkest sides of human beings and society without losing your joie de vivre.
Milo, 1958–62
THE CHILD OF absence is in the closet again — or rather in a closet again, not the same one as before. There’ve been a number of closets already in his short life and he’s found a way to survive in there — he makes an even darker closet for himself inside his head, enters it of his own volition and firmly closes the door behind him. Calling out to no one, needing no one, finding what he needs within himself.
Once he’s in there, in the dark of the dark, he’s filled with anticipation because, closing his eyes, he can summon images and voices and they will come to him. He can elicit the cocker spaniel at the house next door to the German family when he was little and play with it as he was never allowed to at the time, since there was a picket fence between them and only two of the pickets were broken. Now he can throw a stick and the dog will bark excitedly, scamper to fetch the stick and bring it back to him, growling in pride — a game to be endlessly repeated. Then Milo can pet the dog’s head, say Good boy, reward it with a biscuit and feel its small wet scrapy tongue lick his palm because they love each other more than anything in the world. In the dark of the dark he can also meet up with his best friend, an imaginary boygirl named Ness like the Loch Ness monster, and the two of them can take off for wild adventures on the moon or Mars or under the sea or in the jungle or the desert or on the tundra, or exploring glaciers at the North Pole or volcanoes in South America or the topmost tips of the Himalayas. .
(The self-created closet gradually became your carapace, Milo. It would protect you forever. Your concentration was so extreme in there that you could accept literally anything — blows, rape, verbal attacks — and keep a hot star burning in your brain. .)
Other times, in the closet, little Milo hears his mother’s voice singing to him and whispering his secret name, or the voice of Sara Manders reading him a bedtime story. He feels Sara’s ample bosoms against his back as she holds him on her lap and cuddles him, strokes his head and marvels at the beauty of his hair. . Curled on the closet floor, he hugs his own body and sometimes, listening to these beautiful women’s voices or feeling their breasts, his hand slips into his pants and he strokes himself and whines and pants until a blaze of light happens in his brain, after which he can relax and sometimes fall asleep. One day he’s doing this and suddenly the blaze of light turns into a real light, pale and appalling — his foster mother has opened the closet door and flicked on the switch and found him there with his hand inside his pants and his head thrown back, drinking in the slow deep joy of a woman’s flesh moving softly on his skin. She yells, catapulting him out of his reverie, then grabs the weapon nearest to hand — the long metal tube of the vacuum cleaner — and clobbers him over the head with it: God forgive me, but if I don’t beat this evil out of you there’ll be no hope left, you’ll grow up to be a criminal just like your parents! Bad seed on bad ground! As her blows rain down on Milo’s head and back and shoulders — his arms protect his face — the woman also kicks him with her pointed shoes wherever she can fit a kick in. .