The Antagonist

7


06/11/09, 5:44 p.m.


DID I EVER YELL YOU Gord’s famous pick-up line, from the first time he introduced himself to Sylvie? Sad. Two hicks working for isolation pay deep in the blackfly-riddled thickets of Northern Ontario.

“Well mother of Christ, they got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”

Another excerpt from their storybook romance that Sylvie never cared to talk about. It wasn’t the insult to her language and people, mind you, but the cavalier name-in-vain-taking of Our Holy Mother. Sylvie was about a hundred times more Catholic than Gord. It was all about Notre Dame in Sylvie’s neck of the wood, so my old man’s offhand blasphemy — as natural to Gord as scratching his nuts — came very close to losing him the ball game.

Not close enough, unfortunately for every last one of us. If the gods were keeping a pie-plate eye that day, they decided to let the ants go marching blindly forward.

Sylvie was wearing hip waders for the occasion, standing with a fishing pole up to her knees in the Firesteel River as my dad came sloshing over, heedless of soaking his pants, more than a little sloshed himself.

“They biting?” he hollered, slipping on a rock as he approached and having to steady himself against her.

Sylvie frowned as she teetered, bracing her stomach muscles. Not yet annoyed, as she tells it, only perplexed. She didn’t understand how any self-respecting young man from a no-doubt rural, fishing-and-hunting background similar to her own could come sloshing through the river toward her, hollering greetings, and then exhibit, peacocklike, the sheer, splendored idiocy to ask, “Are they biting?”

“No,” replied Sylvie. “Dey aren’t biting.”

Gord, as unperceptive as he’d already proven himself to be, didn’t miss a beat when he caught wind of the accent.

“Well mother of Christ,” he remarked. “They got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”

How is it my life unfurls from a seed as insignificant and stupid as this, Adam? And what kills me is, it isn’t even my seed. I was adopted, for the love of god. It’s not my life; they weren’t my parents. Somewhere, perhaps at precisely the same moment, two giants came together. You know how that happens — the tall girl no one will ask to dance. Until a man even taller comes along, surveys the room with scorn, like Check it out, short-ass losers. And together, they take the floor. She inclines her endless neck up at him, at last, in gratitude.

Or, I don’t know. All I know are here are these two tiny little people standing in a river in Northern Ontario as the gods keep watch, or don’t. A drunken east coast stereotype insults a fine-boned French girl of slender means. Problem is, they have both nothing and everything in common. They are hicks. They are broke. They are working at the building site of a hydro electrical generating station for isolation pay at White Dog Falls because the world has nothing else to offer them as yet. It is 1965 and kids their age are rioting in the cities, upending the socio-sexual landscape, but my soon-to-be parents are farm people, terrified of cities, of drugs, of the irreligious, of those who walk around wearing entirely different coloured skin from them. The world is changing, rapidly, dizzyingly, and change is something they’ve both been raised to fear. They have this in common: they want no part of it.

And that’s the only explanation I come up with when the question comes to mind, as it so frequently has throughout my life. You know the question: Why did she marry the prick? We all know why she stayed with him: Notre Dame. The abiding influence of Mother Church and her sacred bellyful of domineering fathers. Our Lady of the Sit There and Take It. But why marry Gord in the first place? The world had nothing else to offer, maybe — nothing so comfy and familiar as some freckled knee-jerk French-hater telling her she’s useless.

Sylvie had this terrible story she used to tell about her time up North. That is, she didn’t think it was so terrible — to her it was just a footnote to one of the handful of heroic-outdoorswoman narratives that she cultivated pre-Gord. She was proud of those days, because she was one of the only women working up at the hydro electrical sites when they were being built — these places were nothing but backhoes and Quonset huts, not to mention about fifty men for every woman. She would talk about day-long trips by freighter canoe to Moose Factory, about choking back the contents of her stomach during convulsive, vertiginous flights along the Abitibi River in two-seater planes. Sylvie seemed to be wearing hip waders in most of these stories, if not an ammunition vest and deer scent. It’s hard to picture it now, and was hard to picture it then, listening to her talk about those times while watching her fuss with her favourite elephant teapot or tape a colourful swath of fabric over the hole I had kicked in the cupboard in the house that Gord built.

But in those days, Sylvie was a badass. She shot ducks out of the sky. She wrestled pike from the rivers. She castrated bucks. And then she met Gord.

This story she told was about a goose hunting trip to James Bay that she took with none other than her new, red-headed boyfriend — this Rankin fella — and another girl she worked with at the site’s “office” (i.e., a trailer plunked down in a field of mud) just so no one back at camp would get the wrong idea.

And I’ll tell you now that thinking about this story always sends a little shudder through my intestines. Because on this particular occasion, I think, the gods really were watching. This was the moment in Gord and Sylvie’s lives — in my life, by extension — when the gods shifted forward in their divine Barcaloungers, scrambled to turn the volume up on their jewel-encrusted remotes.

That is, the trip to James Bay was cursed. Or divinely ordained, depending on how you look at it. It was still early days with Gord, and he was doing his best to macho it up for the ladies, giving Sylvie, who needed no help whatsoever, pointers on her shooting technique, offering Myrna his sweater when the evening got chilly — a move he regretted because Myrna, who was a big girl, wore the sweater all weekend and ended up stretching out the chest, rendering it unwearable to anyone not sporting a pair of 38Ds. He even tried to banter with the two Indian guides, who refused to be bantered with and at the end of the day always set up their tent and fire several deliberate feet away from the rest of them.

Still, things were fine until the middle of one night when the Indian guides broke their silence to plunge into everybody’s tents and shout at them to pack everything up immediately because the tide was rushing in.

I don’t quite understand the geophysical logistics of this, but the way Sylvie tells it, they got stuck. Their boat was on one side of the water, and they were on the other, and the tide somehow stayed put another two whole days. They couldn’t get out. They ran out of smokes. They had nothing to do. Their food was gone and so they tried boiling one of the geese they had slaughtered over the weekend. The smell was obscene and Sylvie couldn’t eat it. Monday went by, then Tuesday. They were, of course, due back at the site. They began to starve.

Quite the test of manhood for our buddy Gord. And how’d he fare? Sylvie never said, really. They were basically stuck on a spit of land with nothing to do but try to figure out how to make boiled snow goose palatable. Gord didn’t have a lot to work with, no matter what reserves of masculine ingenuity he might have been carrying around with him. You’d think the Indians would’ve had a few tricks up their sleeves, but no. So much for the one-with-nature stereotype — they hadn’t even known the tide was coming in. They just sat around their fire, occasionally taking pot shots at any random flock of geese that happened to be passing overhead. At this point, those honking, sky-encompassing flocks — the sheer numbers of them sailing overhead in almost intelligible patterns — added insult to injury. Nobody wanted to see another goose again.

One thing about the Indians, though, was that they didn’t seem too ruffled by the predicament. They were content to sit and wait for nature to take its course.

“They were patient,” remembered Sylvie. “So we decided to just be patient too.”

Being patient doesn’t sound like a particularly Gordian strategy to me, but then again, this was a time before Gord was really Gord and Sylvie was really Sylvie, as far as I’m concerned. What I mean is, over the years I’ve become more and more convinced that the James Bay Goose Hunt Calamity of ’66 represents a kind of hinge in my parents’ lives. It’s one of those before-and-after moments. The gods saw it. That’s why they stuck the two of them out there on that spit for a while — to let things really soak in. To make sure the changes took.

I don’t know how it worked for Gord exactly. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t a prick before then. Maybe the insult of it all — the unsociable Indians, the boiled goose, the wrecked, tit-imprinted sweater, is what pushed him over the edge; maybe before that he’d just been another lovable leprechaun of a working man. Like I said, I don’t know. It’s not a story Gord ever told. It was a story Sylvie told.

So I know how it worked for Sylvie — and I know exactly when it happened for her.

Sylvie used to begin the story on the Saturday just before they got stuck. She had wandered off on her own across a marsh (in her hip waders, natch) because she had grown tired of Gord talking all the time and telling her what to do and then always taking the shot before she could. (“I just get so excited,” he’d apologize afterward.) So she wandered off on her own, not too far, she promised the guides, and sat for a while in a clearing on the other side of the marsh, kept just cool enough — even in her heavy waders and long underwear — by the relentless, whipping wind, and just warm enough thanks to the blazing October sunshine settling across her skin like a cat across a lap.

Wilderness. Sylvie in the wild, hat pulled down, wind in her ears. I like to picture her like that. She stayed there for the next hour, she told me, because it was so peaceful. She got one goose — it practically landed at her feet — and then another, which plopped into the middle of the marsh. Well it was time to get going anyway. She felt the freezing water strain against the rubber of her waders, hugging her legs like pleading children, as she sloshed forward to get the second goose.

But just a few steps in, something bucked at her side, almost throwing her off balance and into the drink. It was goose number one, still kicking at life.

Criss! she yelped, grabbing at it.

But goose number one had no interest in being groped. Goose number one had come to, discovered itself to be gut-shot, dangling from some Frenchwoman’s scrawny shoulder, and was entirely taken aback. It made its feelings known to my mother.

She sloshed her way back to solid ground holding the thrashing goose out in front of her, barely able to keep it still.

For all her experience in the bush, this had never happened before. Usually when Sylvie made a creature dead, it could be counted upon to stay that way. Not this guy, though. Reason being, Adam: this was a gift from the above-mentioned gods — a honking, feathery thunderbolt, if you will. Celestial provocation.

“I was gonna have to break his neck,” Sylvie related to me whenever she got to this point in the story. “I thought to myself, Câline de bine, I’m gonna have to break his neck.”

There was always something poignant about my mother’s bestowal of gender upon the goose (in which case I guess I should say gander). You might think this was her French-speaker’s habit of sexing every noun — but Sylvie had spoken English right alongside of French her whole life and never had that habit. I believe it was just my mother’s way of getting across the intimacy of that moment. The fact that she had found herself confronted with a being, an individual — how else to put it: a dude. A dude whose outraged, flappy-winged life she needed to extinguish then and there. There was no way she could make it back across the marsh with a thrashing goose in tow.

So she began to throttle the goose.

Creak! Went the divine Barcaloungers, shifting forward in unison.

I remember her first telling me this story when I was ten or so, and I remember feeling at this point in the narrative exactly what I’m feeling now, as I tell it to you. A dread. A kind of teetering feeling, like a car halfway over a cliff.

“But I couldn’t choke him.”

What do you mean you couldn’t choke him? You felt bad? You showed it mercy?

“No I mean he just . . . wouldn’t choke.”

It wouldn’t die! Sylvie throttled and throttled the snowy bastard, and still it kicked, still it thrashed. Let it be known: this was one hell of a goose. I mean have you ever seen the necks on those things? They may as well have been designed with ready-made finger-welts, they’re so chokeable.

So Sylvie knelt down on the ground, the better to throttle her goose. She squeezed and shook and strangled, for god knows how long.

“And he just wouldn’t choke!” ends this part of the story.

Now there are a few things I don’t understand here. Premier among them, of course, being why wouldn’t the dude choke? Even putting that aside: I mean, my god, Sylvie could’ve simply twisted the thing’s head around a few times like a bottle cap, couldn’t she? I’m sorry if that sounds horrible, but this is life and death. She does not want the goose to be alive at this moment, she wants it to be dead, and when you want something to be dead, I would think, you have to be prepared to get a little extreme. Playtime, as they say, is over.

So what did Sylvie do next?

“I thought: I better kneel on him.”

Mom! You knelt on the goose?

“I tried to, like, kneel his breath out of him.”

Adam, do you see how this is horrible? Sylvie in the wilderness, the wind off the bay, the silence in the wind, the struggling goose, the living goose, shot out of the sky, my mother and the thrashing goose, throttling the goose, strangling the goose, the wind in her ears, in its feathers, kneeling, at last, the better to throttle, the continued thrashing of goose, the endless moment of no-death, no end in sight, the angelic wings, spreading and contracting, spreading and contracting.

The goose does not want to go down.

So Sylvie knelt on it.

Sylvie (I thought at ten, and ever since), don’t do it. Don’t kneel on the dude.

She knelt on it a nice long time. Who knows how long. Until the goose was finally good and dead.

Then she picked it up, flung it back over her shoulder, and waded to the other side of the marsh, where my father stood waiting.