Tables have been set up in the parish hall.
The neighbourhood families are seated, waiting patiently for their soup.
You feel like you’re at a restaurant. You try to sit up straight, to be worthy of your outfit.
You can’t wait. You like to eat.
You recognize almost all the families around you. They all look dressed up. More than usual. Not to hide their hunger. No, to greet it with dignity. To put it on notice that they aren’t afraid of it.
And yet the sound of hungry bodies finally being fed betrays the precariousness of the moment. Under their pristine fabrics, they are all hanging by a thread.
There are no jobs. The stores are deserted; the banks are closed.
The park benches and the libraries are filled. They are the two hotspots for the newly unemployed.
While getting an encyclopedia for a school project, you walk by some twenty men taking refuge in their reading. Your eyes linger on one of them. His five-o’clock shadow, his blue eyes glued to the page. Nothing can come between him and what he is reading. He seizes the words like a wolf seizes its prey. They are practically bleeding. They are no longer a refuge; they are a lifebuoy.
Your eyes move down the man’s long legs, which lead to his feet, which are bare, wrapped in newspaper. You’re sure he read it with the same intensity before using it as protection. He knows the words he is walking in.
We believe that the main causes of the crisis are moral and that we will cure them through a return to the Christian spirit.
Introduction to the Programme de restauration sociale (1933)
Father Bisson has one eyebrow, and you have always wanted to touch it. It looks soft.
It’s so hot in the church that his eyebrow is beaded with drops that would make a pretty necklace.
You look at your mother’s dry neck, and you imagine her wearing it. The two fine bones of her clavicle as a coat rack. Her neck stiff from being bent. From looking at what has to be washed rather than what is taking to the skies.
You squirm on the bench, which creaks. Up front, the priest is addressing the crowd with conviction.
‘Our economic recovery must bring jobs to all of our labourers and the unemployed. If the fervour of prayer, patience with the heat and fatigue, could bring about change, our wishes would come true, but we also need to change our lives so that they are more consistently generous and so that mortal sin, often repeated and rarely regretted, does not destroy most of the kind acts of a given day.’
You are seven years old. According to canon law, you have reached the age of reason, and you have to confess at least once a year.
It’s dark in the box. It smells like damp wood. It’s comfortable. You sit down. For years you have watched the long queue for the confessional, the bodies lined up, looking stiff.
You always thought that the bodies told a different story while they were waiting. As if they were already being scrutinized, spied on.
You try to think of something to talk about. It’s your first time. It’s important that he remember you. That he look forward to seeing you again.
You go into the box. You close your eyes, gulp down the warm air around you. You gulp down the vices of those who have been here before you. A fix of weakness.
It’s your turn. There are small openings in front of you through which thin shafts of light pass, through which you can make out the man you will be speaking to.
He tells you he is listening.
You want it to last.
He repeats that he is listening. He calls you his child.
You can’t find the words you had prepared. So you stand up.
And you want him to remember you.
You’re hot. You lean into the screen, study it, look for the man on the other side.
And you stick out your tongue. You drag it slowly over the holes. You look for a path that will take you closer to him. You leave trails of saliva on the varnished wood. You slowly slide your tongue into each slot, and on the other side, he has fallen silent.
You leave the confessional, a splinter between your teeth.
You feel light. He won’t forget you.
There is no gas left to fuel the cars.
Achilles attaches his to two horses. They will be his motor.
The idea is not his; it is spreading across the country, ironically called the Bennett buggy, after Canadian prime minister Robert Bedford Bennett, who is one of the people running the country into the ground.
Your father comes home late at night in his Bennett buggy.
You sleep between Monique and Claire. Claire talks in her sleep. A foreign language that sounds like Latin. You shove the end of the sheet in her mouth to shut her up.
Claire is five years old. At age eighteen, she will enter the convent, bound to God for the rest of her life.
The sound of horseshoes downstairs: your father, Achilles, is coming home. The crisis has taken his job. Now he has a make-work job, invented by the government to deal with unemployment, something to keep men from weeping or sleeping at the library. To keep them from overdosing on free time.
Achilles comes home more tired than before. He liked being useful, and make-work jobs change every day but are all in vain.
Today, he picked dandelions. They’re a weed; there are a lot of them, everywhere. Enough to keep the men busy for a few weeks.
Achilles must have uprooted five thousand of them. He roamed the city, eyes peeled, looking for yellow flowers. Enough to make a person go mad. Golden streaks everywhere. Achilles has blisters on his hands. He was paid eight cents for his work. He is not unemployed. He earned a living today.
Achilles liked being a teacher.
You love Achilles.
You hear him unhitch the horses from the car; you tear down the stairs and throw yourself at him.
He tells you to go to bed, but you don’t obey right away. You know that you still have two chances. You help him feed the horses.
He tells you again to go to bed.
You bring him a damp towel, which he wipes his face with.
You ask him whether you can go with him tomorrow.
He tells you to go to bed.
You know you have to obey this time.
You go upstairs.
Achilles goes into his bedroom and lies down next to Claudia. He lifts her nightgown and touches her thighs. He turns his wife over and seeks brutal refuge in her. Where he is a man. Where he is proud.
Claudia doesn’t want to but doesn’t say so.
Claudia is thirty-three years old and has five children.
Claudia is a distant cousin of Émile Nelligan.
Claudia has black eyes that arch downward. Waning moons.
Claudia has long fingers that have played Chopin.
Claudia has short nails with dirt under them from the potatoes she peels.
Claudia doesn’t sleep anymore.
Claudia knows that she has to have six more children to get the two hundred acres of dirt the government has promised.
Claudia thinks that she already has dirt under her fingernails and doesn’t want any more.
Claudia