“So where did this Anglo cousin come from?” queries François-Joseph.
“Yeah, Grandad, where’d you dig him up? ‘S not every day you get to meet a cousin who’s already eight years old!”
“He’s Declan’s boy. .”
“Who else?” grumbles Marie-Thérèse.
“But where’s he kept him all these years? We never saw Uncle Declan with a kid. .”
“I had no idea, either,” says Neil. “Declan came over last week to try to wangle some money out of me. .”
“Nothin’ new about that,” observes Marie-Thérèse.
“Just as you say! I told him he’d exhausted my patience, to say nothing of his credit. . So to force me to give in, he wound up telling me the fifty bucks weren’t for him. Claimed he needed the money for his son’s pension. .”
“Doesn’t it just break your heart?” says Marie-Thérèse, shaking her head.
“I didn’t believe him myself. Come on, I told him, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes with tall tales like that! Where is this so-called son of yours?”
“A miracle he could even remember, after so many whiskys. .”
“Well it turned out to be a miracle indeed! He fished out the child’s birth certificate and a whole slew of official papers. . Believe it or not, Milo had been in five different foster families and Declan had never lost track of him. .”
“Good heavens!”
“You were in five different families?”
Milo shrugs, gaze trained on his plate. He can tell the conversation revolves around him, but the gist of it escapes him.
“Why’d they move him around so much?”
“Beats me. But the idea that a grandson of mine had been living in Montreal all this time without my knowing about it. . well, I just couldn’t stand it. I had to go get him.”
“I understand,” Régis mutters. “You did the right thing.”
“Just makes one more mouth for us to feed!” Marie-Thérèse sighs.
“Oh, one mouth more or less,” says Neil.
“Easy to say, for people who have their noses in books all day long,” says Marie-Thérèse. “The rest of us work hard to make ends meet!”
“Come on, now, Marie-Thérèse!” says Neil. “I couldn’t leave him in a Protestant household!”
This is his last card, but it’s a joker and he knows it. Of all the tales of his youth in Ireland with which Neil had regaled the family when Marie-Thérèse was little, the one about the stolen children had made the deepest impression on her. During the endless merciless strike that had paralyzed and famished the entire city of Dublin in 1913, British soldiers had gone stomping into strikers’ homes, kidnapped their children and shipped them off to Great Britain to be taken in by Protestant families. And what honest Catholic worker could bear the prospect of finding himself with a stubborn, glitter-eyed little Protestant at his own kitchen table? They’d returned to the factories. .
After dinner, Milo’s cousins take him on a guided tour of the farm. Close-up on their great rubber boots squelching in the mud as he follows them across the barnyard. In the barn, he recoils at first from the clouds of bottle flies and the pungent smell of manure, but is soon irresistibly drawn to the cows. He feels more empathy with these big kind warm brown tail-swishing dumb beasts than with Jean-Joseph and François-Joseph, fourteen and thirteen respectively, who belch and fart, smoke and swear and swagger to make sure he knows who’s boss.
“Cat got your tongue?” they ask him.
He says not a word in the course of the visit. . CUT.
A SERIES OF ephemeral, floating scenes to sketch out the following year. Milo at school, Milo in the stable. . lingering a moment over Milo at church. We recognize him squeezed into one of the front pews along with his young schoolmates. . His cousin’s classes are farther back; the rows for parents and grandparents start in the middle of the church. We notice that Marie-Thérèse and Régis are among them, but not Neil. .
Dissolve to a winter evening on the farm. Marie-Thérèse has summoned Milo to help her with the job of pickling cucumbers. The kitchen air is opaque with steam.
(The telephone plays a role in this scene, so we’ll have to go back and establish its presence during Milo’s first dinner at the farm: a black Bakelite contraption on the wall above the table. Maybe Marie-Thérèse could mention it, proud of having a telephone at last. Or maybe it could ring during the meal, causing everyone to jump because they’re not used to it yet. . We’ll see. .)
Seated next to the wall, at the farthest end of the long maple wood table, Milo carefully pours vinegar into jars as his aunt peels and chops garlic across from him. Suddenly she looks up at him.
“You’re a little infidel, aren’t you?”
“Sorry?”
“You lived with a Protestant family and they put a bunch of lies in your head?”
“I dunno.”
“Do you believe, at least?”
“Believe what?”
“In everything the preacher says at Sunday Mass. In God the Father and the Holy Virgin and Our Lord who died on the Cross for our sins, and all the rest, and that if you don’t believe you’ll go to Hell?”
“. .”
“You don’t listen at all in church, do you?”
“. .”
“Don’t think I don’t notice it. I watch you and I can tell you’re not paying attention. You don’t sing with the rest of us and you don’t pray with the rest of us, you just sit there. You go off somwhere else in your head.”
“. .”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it, Milo? I’ve seen you, there’s no point in denyng it.”
“I don’t deny it.”
“Well, believe me, Milo, this won’t do at all. Because in two or three years you’ll have to go to catechism classes, and prepare for your confirmation, and prove that you’ve grasped the essence of the True Religion!”
“. .”
“That you’re not a heretic Protestant like the family your grandad found you in!”
“I’m not anything.”
Marie-Thérèse’s voice begins to rise.
“What do you mean, you’re not anything? You live with the rest of us, don’t you? Your name’s Noirlac, isn’t it? Like it or not, you’re part of this family, and I’m gonna teach you to be a good Catholic!”
The child’s stubborn silence makes her see red.
“You hear me, Milo? Otherwise you’ll land up at Bordeaux like your good-for-nothing of a father. . A lazybones delinquent! A parasite! Hey, are you listening to me? Hey, I’m talking to you! All right. .”
Taking the receiver off its hook on the wall, she clobbers him over the head with it. Bong!
Involuntary tears start to Milo’s eyes but he turns his head, looks out the window and concentrates on the falling snow. Joins up with the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, the little match girl, the ruby-eyed nightingale, the ugly duckling. Will not give his aunt the pleasure of making him cry. . (I can just see you, Milo, sitting way at the end of that table, scrunched up against the wall. I can see you. .) She hits him again. Bong! She’s acquiring a taste for that Bong!
“You’re proud, aren’t you? A boy from the big city, hey? Too good for us country bumpkins, hey? Is that it? Is that it, hey, you whore-son?” (Bong!) “Hey! Answer when you’re spoken to!” (Bong!) “Do you at least know you’re a whoreson? Well, if you didn’t know it before, you know it now. Oh, the bitch and the boozer, your parents were made for each other! Two losers! Two nothings! Son of nothing, son of less than nothing, that’s what you are — you hear me?” (Bong, bong!) “Son of absence!”