YOU’RE RIGHT, MILO — MOVIEGOERS enjoy blood and gore of all sorts; they’ll watch in mesmerized delight as people cut each other’s head off, stab each other in the back, or bomb whole cities to oblivion; many of them also revel in seeing adult males rape little girls; but for some reason, though it’s one of the most widespread forms of violence on the planet, grown women hitting little boys makes them squirm. . Go figure, eh?
(Hear that, Milo? You’ve even taught me to say eh? like a Canadian. Hey. Are you doing all right? Are we doing all right? Can we go on, my love? I love you, Astuto. Let’s go on. Yes, yes, we’ll change the name, no problem — do it in a single click, soon as we finish the first draft. .)
THE LITTLE BASTARD knows how to read now, in English. He learned to read with a vengeance. Having completed the first two grades of school in a single year, he reads everything he can get his hands on, even if it’s only the dreary Reader’s Digest in the bathroom or the newspaper called the Gazette or the Bible his current foster mother keeps on her bedside table for daily inspiration. The printed words waft him away to freedom, set his mind spinning with stories. The main thing is to be out of this world, out, out. .
Though we can also toss in a few images of Milo’s so-called real life during those years (Milo in the classroom, his attention riveted on the teacher, on the blackboard, oblivious to the children around him. . Milo in the school courtyard, bullied by older boys and unexpectedly fighting back so that within three seconds the leader’s nose is gushing with blood. . Milo walking home alone in the four o’clock December dark. . Milo shoveling snow. . mowing the lawn. . sitting stiff and straight on the pew of a Protestant church between two stiff and straight adults, one male, one female, whose heads we’ll never see), it’s clear that his real real life now unfolds inside the closet, in the dark of the dark. Ecstasy of images, voices drifting through silence. . He’s become addicted to solitude.
And then — brutally — he gets weaned of it. Cold turkey.
He comes home from school one warm June day, opens the screen door and brings up short. His foster parents (still headless torsos) are seated in the front room with a gray-bearded stranger; packed and waiting in the hallway is Milo’s suitcase. At lightning speed, his eyes shift from grown-up to suitcase to grown-up, but no matter how often he changes the order of his perusal, he still can’t fathom what’s going on.
CUT to the enormous, dimly lit hall of Windsor Station in Montreal. Chaos. Hordes of people rushing every which way amidst the hiss of steam engines and the strident sigh of whistles, shouting, smoking, waving, embracing and calling out to each other, dragging bags and trunks in their wake. Spiffy, red-hatted, chocolate-skinned porters shoving luggage carts. Arrival and departure announcements that sound like threats, reverberating over the loudspeaker in French. After scanning the crowd, the camera zooms in from behind on the old man, who is pulling Milo’s heavy suitcase with one hand and Milo with the other.
The boy balks, in shock. The gray-bearded stranger turns to him and at last we see his face. It may take us a moment to recognize Neil.
“Come on,” he says. “We’ll miss the train.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“They beat the bejesus out of you and you want to stay with them?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“I didn’t ask you if you wanted to go. I’m your grandpa and I’m taking you out of that Protestant hellhole.”
“You’re not my grandpa.”
“So I am, bless you. Look.” He draws an Irish passport from his breast pocket. “Know how to read? Neil Noirlac. You see, it’s written there. And what’s your name?”
“. .”
“What’s your name, young’un?”
“Milo.”
“Milo what?”
The boy can’t help muttering Noirlac under his breath.
“Right. And where would you have gotten a name like Noirlac?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Do you know its meaning?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Black lake, it means. Did you know your name was black lake, my boy? Do you speak French?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Come on, now, Milo, or we’ll be missing our train! Way they’ve been treating you, those Protestants are lucky I came without my gun.”
“You got a gun?”
“Naturally, for hunting rabbit and lynx and moose.”
“Will you teach me how to hunt?”
Neil gathers the child in his arms and pretends for a moment that he is strong enough to carry him. He isn’t, though, and, sensing this, Milo gives in.
“I’ll come wit you,” he says, “if you teach me to hunt.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
CUT to the two of them in a train, hurtling northeastward through the province of Quebec. Around them, other passengers are chattering in French. Neil takes out a paper bag and hands a sandwich to Milo, who accepts and devours it without a word, staring out the window at flash-by forest as he chews. Never before has he set foot outside of Montreal.
CUT to a Dubé family meal, the noonday meal they call dinner, in the kitchen of a large farmhouse in Mauricie. Seated on benches on either side of a long maple wood table are Neil’s oldest daughter, a brittly pretty woman named Marie-Thérèse; her husband, Régis Dubé, his cheeks mottled with smallpox scars; and their two strapping teenagers, François-Joseph and Jean-Joseph, all slurping soup and shouting in French at the same time.
Milo is lost. Even were he able to revive the dormant rudiments of French he once possessed, this clipped, slanted, rural version of the tongue would be opaque to him. Occasionally Neil leans down to translate for him, but every time she catches him at it Marie-Thérèse slams her hand on the table.
“Papa! Stop that at once! This is a French-speaking house, he might as well get used to it from the start. I don’t want you running off at the mouth again with your bullshit bilingual notions, do you hear me?”
“How can he be expected to learn?” Neil protests, stroking his beard. “The poor kid doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.”
“He’ll learn as he goes along, like everybody else.”
“Gotta be patient,” Régis suggests, his mouth three or four centimeters away from his bowl of soup. (Régis is a cowed man who seems perpetually to be ducking, even when not bent over to eat.) “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he adds, so softly as to be inaudible to all but us.