John
Woolfrey 1315
words
1729
Rue de la Visitation
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
H2L
3C3
(514)
597-2189
Le Corbeau
Copyright by Raymond John Woolfrey
Published in Matrix magazine
Won Honourable Mention in
New Voices from Quebec literary contest,
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
On this May
morning the vacant lot outside
my kitchen is all shorn and tidy after the army of city gardeners swept through
earlier in the week. It’s noon, the back door is open, and we can hear the
landlady’s children playing in the courtyard below.
Patrice is drinking his coffee black—black
as the hair on his head, black as the hair that covers most of his body. He’s a
big man at six-foot-two and about two hundred pounds. He said he just turned
thirty.
When he talks he smiles, uses his arms,
and shrugs his shoulders a lot. He’s reminiscing about his childhood in
Sept-Îles, and he insists on speaking in English, slightly broken. “My mudder
found a bird outside that had flown into the windowpane. She took it up and
brought it inside. We put it in a cage we made with wire for chickens, and all the
time it went ‘Augh! Augh!’ while spreading its wings.” Patrice makes an
imitation with his great arms.
“It was big and black, ’ow you say, un
corbeau.”
“A crow,” I say.
“And after it was better, it stayed around
all summer—it never went away until winter. It would come to the door each
morning and knock at the window, like dat.” Patrice makes a beak with his
fingers and pecks at an imaginary pane between us.
“And each day my mother would give him a
h’egg. He would put ’is…”
“His beak,” I offer.
“He would put ’is beak into it,” Patrice
continues, “put ’is ’ead back, and drink de h’egg, just like dat!” Patrice
tilts his head back, and with his thick lips sucks from a pretend egg.
“Once a year I visit my sister.” Patrice
starts a new story. “She lives in Nouveau-Brunswick. Each week we walk to de
village—it’s a long way. We walk all de way dere.” He walks his fingers along
the tabletop to show them walking.
“And dere we shop or take a coffee, and
den we walk de ’ole way back. It is very nice.”
Earlier, the phone rang—someone from
Ontario saying my sister is having another manic episode. I was upset by the
call afterward, and confided to Patrice that I am having a hard time coping
with her illness, that I found it easier to accept my friend Tom’s death from aids than my sister’s episodes. At
least with Tom I knew where he was going. With Elizabeth, I don’t even know
where she is during those times. Is she conscious? Does she feel? Does she know
what she’s saying? I told Patrice I feel guilty, as though I should be doing
something.
He told me his brother killed himself.
Shrugging his shoulders, he said, “You always tink you could ’ave done
somet’ing, but in de h’end dey will do what dey will do, and dere’s not’ing you
can do about it.” He smiled warmly.
I asked him how his mother took it, losing
a child.
“She shopped. Every day she went down to Sainte-Catherine
and she shopped. She would buy dis and dat. Dat is what she did,” he said,
still smiling.
As I stood there regarding him at my
kitchen table on this spring morning with the green of the grass and the trees
outside the open windows, the crab-apple blossoms all pink, I felt consoled and
deeply grateful for this big, dark man and his beaming face. He knew even more
than I of the bewilderment and pain that has been crippling me. He made me feel
less alone; I had found company in this void of helplessness.
We met last night at the urinals at the
bar. He figured I was English-speaking from my looks and so spoke to me in
English. “I love dis, ’ow you say, urinoir,” he boomed in a magnificent
basso that echoed off the tiles. “I come ’ere each time. Dere is nobody to de
right (it was the wall), and I ’ave all dis space to de left. I am so ’appy at
dis urinoir.” He made great sweeping movements with his arms, and
grinned.
I politely tried to work my way out of the
washroom and the conversation, but in the course of it all he mentioned he was
an artist. Perhaps he isn’t just an annoying drunk on the make, I thought, and
so I took another look at the urinal to consider it as through an artist’s
eyes.
We continued our conversation—or was it
his discourse? I figured he might be interesting to pass some time with—the
type of unusual entertainment I keep an eye out for when I go out. We talked
and danced, sometimes just me dancing, while he stood on the edge chatting with
people he knew.
When we left, he followed me home—all the
way protesting that he would not come home with me, or saying he was leaving in
two minutes. By then I just wanted the company and didn’t care about sex.
In a few minutes we were on my street,
just half a block from my flat. Patrice stopped me and said: “I see you all in
a black suit on this street, fifty years ago. The street is dark and trees grow
up along it.”
I didn’t know what to say—I was thinking
of the 1939 photograph of the street that hangs in my living room. Though he
repeated yet again that he had to leave in two minutes, I lured him up to look
at it.
In the old eight-by-eleven you can see my
building on the left and a woman in a pinafore standing on the balcony.
Part-way down the curving staircase, a boy looks longingly up the pavement
toward a small bunch of older boys. “What’s my name?” Patrice asked, after
examining the photo. “Patrice,” I replied. He couldn’t recall mine but was
pleased I did his. I turned off the lamps and lit a candle. I put on my
favourite tape—a motley collection of polyphonic voices and lute pieces, and we
sat on the floor. Patrice asked for a pencil and some paper and then he drew as
we talked.
This morning, before he got up, I found a
sketch of three women standing before a harbour, and another of a woman’s head
above which he’d scribbled the word “disgusting” as a critique of his work. At
the very top was a single line of a copy of the manuscript I had just sent off;
the other drawing had been made on the back of a flawed cover letter to the
magazine.
Right now Patrice is telling me that he
lay awake for awhile this morning staring at the oil painting I did of my
beagle when I was eleven. (I moved to the couch early this morning when he took
over the bed.)
“I stared at dat painting,” he tells me.
“It is so cute, I just love dat painting. De little eyes, de
nose, de h’ears....” He crunches up
his face in pleasure.
His gaze turns to the window and out. I’m
sitting still, looking out the window beyond his shoulder at the young greenery
outside, as a warm, delicate breeze gently passes through the kitchen, and the
landlady’s small son narrates one of his scenarios to his little sister. After
a few moments Patrice emerges from his reverie to glance at his coffee cup. It
is empty. He says it’s time to go.
As he leaves, he kisses me on both cheeks,
and in a matter-of-fact, friendly way says, “You will say ’ello to me if you
see me again, won’t you?” Of course I will. I hope I run into him again, just
to be reminded of his spring visit when the crab apple was in its pink
glory—both brief but exquisite in their bloom into my life.