He pushes her up against the wall. Raising the knife, he looks calmly into her eyes.
“Régis! Help!”
The knifepoint comes to a hovering halt a quarter inch from Marie-Thérèse’s chest. Then Milo turns and plants the knife with all his might in the exact center of the maple wood table. His mother wouldn’t want him to spend the rest of his time on earth cooped up in lawcourts and jail cells. She’d want him to be free.
“You’ll see me again when you’re dead,” he says.
The knife is still vibrating when he slams the door and walks off the Dubé property for the last time.
• • • • •
Neil, 1920
SEPTEMBER. SLANTED SUNLIGHT. Maple trees aflame. Breathtaking beauty of the Quebec countryside during its brief autumn. The camera pans across the Chabot property (familiar to us as the Dubé property from forty years later) to a woodshed, its door open a crack. Sliding through the crack along with the sunlight, we fall on a page of Neil’s notebook. Uneasily perched on a stack of old apple crates, the writer is trying to write. We’re reminded of a similar scene in his Dublin bedroom a few years ago. . but his inner voice is even more anguished now than it was then. As Neil works on his text about exile, the camera glides through the woodshed and enters a vaster, barnlike space, lit in chiaroscuro by flashes of sunlight coming through small windows. There, it explores an enigmatic concatenation of tables and woodstoves, vats and tubes, bottles and utensils — not the laboratory of a mad scientist, but the ordinary paraphernalia required for the manufacture of maple syrup.
The thing about exile, Neil begins in voice-over, is that it forces you back into childhood. Even the first time around, being a child was mostly unpleasant. As soon as you can think, you are painfully conscious of being smaller and weaker than the powerful, prestigious giants who surround you. They despise, dominate, manipulate and look down on you. You are impatient to grow up, break free of them, become your own man. Thus, it is confounding and humiliating, at nearly thirty years of age, to find yourself, as it were, back at square one again. If your exile includes a language change, your sense of stupidity and helplessness will be compounded. . no, compound rhymes with confound, let’s say aggravated. . no, exacerbated. . no, aggravated. . by your lack of proficiency in the new tongue. You get by all right in private conversation with your loved ones, for loved ones tend to be indulgent. . but when you are obliged to deal on a daily basis with a large group of people, well acquainted among themselves and accustomed to communicating through quirky colloquialisms, inside jokes, onomatopoeia, muttered prayers and blasphemies, you suffer not only as much as but more than a child — for, unlike the latter, you have no hope or even wish of attaining proficiency in the local idiom. . It is most exasperating. I love Marie-Jeanne, but. . No, cross that out. This isn’t my diary, it is a personal reflection on the universal theme of exile. . Brought up in the city, you find yourself in the country. Armed with a law degree from Ireland’s finest university, you are suddenly being instructed in the fine points of making maple syrup. Formerly on intimate terms with the greatest poets and novelists of the day, you now prefer the company of cows to that of what passes, locally, for humanity. . No, that’s too nasty. After all, there were peasants in Ireland, too; I simply didn’t frequent them. I fought for their rights, of course — indeed I risked my life doing so — but I did not have to eat, drink and sleep with them, put up with their pungent body odors and their primitive sense of humor. New paragraph.
Tolstoy in no way jeopardized his literary greatness by cutting wood with his muzhiks, because he did so on his own property, in the country and the language of his birth. He was not hampered and handicapped at every step by foreignness, but remained master of the situation. The violent changes inflicted by exile plunge you back into the immaturity and dependency of childhood. They turn you into a mumbling, stumbling, stuttering nincompoop, incapable of running your own life. Bad enough for the common mortal, this state of affairs is disastrous for the writer. In the space of a mere few days — the time it takes to travel from the Old Country to the New — he very literally loses the ground beneath his feet. His pen’s feverish activity is turned to ice by a series of paralyzing questions (I can correct these metaphors later): Who are my readers? Who are my characters? What is my subject?
Since crossing the Atlantic, I’ve met precious few people who ever heard of the Liffey, the Easter Rising, Padraic Pearse or Major John MacBride; French Canadians care not one whit about the Irish rebels, Sinn Féin, or the act recently passed by British Parliament allowing Protestant Unionists in the North to retain control of the six counties of Ulster. My country is splitting in two, Good Lord, and so is my head. . Mrs. McGuire told me that here in Montreal in 1916, only a couple of months after the Easter Rising, there was an anticonscription demonstration at the Place des Armes. The French Canadians didn’t want to be enrolled in English Canada’s war — which is to say England’s war — any more than the Irish did. Mrs. McGuire can see the analogy because, like me, she has a foot on either side of the ocean. But if my future reading public is made up exclusively of Irish-born residents of Quebec, what stories can I, should I, must I tell? I’m losing my stories! They’re dying on my lips!
Just as Neil tearfully scribbles in his notebook They’re dying on my lips! we hear a blood-curdling female scream. The camera rushes back to film him as he leaps to his feet and bolts from the woodshed, letting pencil and notebook tumble to the floor.
CUT to the bedroom in which Marie-Jeanne has just given birth to their first son. The mother is still flat on her back, but the child has already vanished. Several devout, efficient females — her mother, a couple of older sisters or cousins (he can never keep them straight), a nurse and a young midwife named Marie-Louise — rush to and fro, taking care of everything in French.
Neil has become a stranger in his own home. No, it is not even his own home. He has become a stranger, period.
“Is it a boy?” he asks timidly from the doorway, not quite daring to cross into the room.
“Yes, sir,” says Marie-Louise as she strides down the hallway, arms piled high with bloody sheets. “Yes, it’s a little boy. Mrs. Noirlac wants to name it Pierre-Joseph, after her father.”
Neil winces.
CUT to that evening: At last the little family is alone together. The baby sucks fiercely at Marie-Jeanne’s breast, and her face is suffused with light.
“All men are Joseph,” says Neil.
“What, darling?” says Marie-Jeanne. “What are you mumbling in your beard?”
“All men are Joseph,” he repeats. “Every childbirth is a Nativity, know what I mean? It’s between mother and child. I sit here looking at the two of you, and you shine so brightly it makes my eyes hurt. Joseph is irrelevant. It’s obvious he can’t be the father.”
“Neil!” says Marie-Jeanne with a laugh like the soft jingling of sleigh bells. “Don’t tell me you think I cheated on you!”
“No, but our baby’s the child of God. It’s a miracle, every childbirth is a miracle. Joseph has nothing to do with it and he knows it. He sits there in the stable, feeling silly and out of place. . Uh. . anything I can do to make you more comfortable, dear? Want me to smooth out the hay under your rear end?”
“What are you trying to tell me, sweet Neil?”
“Nothing, just that. .”
Moving over to the window, Neil stares out into the gathering dark.