Black Dance

  When Milo comes to his senses, Timide is sobbing uncontrollably.

  Edith helps the two of them to their feet and dusts them off, then hands them a box of cookies and a tin of sardines: “This is all I could find.”

  CUT.

  A long, depressing shot of the two boys walking through forest in silence: “I’m sorry, Timide . . . I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

  CUT TO: The boys’ dead campfire early in the morning. They’ve spent the night huddled against a hillside. As chill dawn whitens the sky, Milo scrambles to his feet.

  “Let’s go,” he says, bending over the bumpy lump that is Timide’s body. “Today’s the big day.”

  “Let me sleep, you bag of shit!”

  “No, let’s go. Come on, Timide, let’s go. This is no time to fall apart. We’re almost there, I can feel it. Can’t you? Can’t you feel the big city right nearby? Come on, get the hell out of bed or I’ll finish the trip without you!”

  As there’s nothing Timide dreads more than finding himself alone in the middle of nowhere, he angrily rises and gets dressed. The boys scramble up to the crest of the hill . . . And there it is, shimmering and scintillating in the pink-mauve softness of the spring dawn, white ribbons of smoke rising from its chimneys and early sun rays glancing redly off its skyscrapers, rippling down from the mountain at its heart to the river whose long arms hold it in a tight embrace, stretching beyond mountain and river as far as the eye can see: the island city of Montreal.

  Awed, Timide and Milo lie flat on their stomachs and gaze down at the unfathomable cement-and-glass beast.

  “There’s my mother,” says Milo, stretching out an arm. “See? I told you we’d make it! She’s right there.”

  The following second, in close-up, we see his body snap into a state of unbearable alertness. Pressed against the earth, his skin and flesh have sensed the vibration of a motor vehicle. Now his rearview vision records the silent blue flash of a revolving light . . . and before Timide realizes what’s going on, the two of them have been roughly cuffed and shoved into the backseat of a police van.

  HOW SHOULD WE film your jail stints, Astuto?

  The nice thing about prisons as compared with closets is that you get to meet other prisoners. It was within the walls of that juvenile detention home that you first met and talked with Indians. At school you’d learned oodles of things about the British and the French and their proud, heroic, capitalist descendants in North America . . . but about the native inhabitants of this land? Nothing but colorful shreds of phony folklore. The more Indians you met, the madder you got. Never in human history, it seemed to you, had a people so utterly accepted its defeat. The problem was that in addition to having had their land stolen and their way of life destroyed, Indian men had seen their youngest and prettiest women snatched away by swarms of ugly, aggressive, bearded, foul-smelling, land-hungry, profit-seeking white men—who, moreover, having crossed the ocean womanless, were as horny as bulls—so that within a couple of decades there was a huge métis-blood population. Undone, Indian men had basically locked themselves away for the past three hundred years in a resentful, alcoholic silence. Yeah, I know, Milo, protests and petitions by native Canadians managed to make a few improvements in the second half of the twentieth century, but basically it was way too little way too late . . .

  WE COME UPON our hero in his grandfather’s study. Close-up on his face at age sixteen: detention has changed him.

  “So they put handcuffs on you, did they?”

  Milo nods.

  “A surprising sensation, isn’t it? Unforgettable.”

  “You were arrested once, Grandpa?”

  “I was, yes. But I was a grown man by then, several years older than you are now. You’ve always been precocious, eh, whippersnapper? First you skipped two grades at school and then you skipped straight to the juvenile delinquents’ home, without even stopping off at reform school along the way.”

  “Dey’re talking of sending me to a reform school now.”

  Neil puffs away at his pipe and rocks in his rocking chair, taking his time. Both men are happy and neither is impatient.

  “What did you do, Grandpa?”

  “We’ll come round to that. I can see why you ran away from that boarding school, Milo, given the punishments they’d been inflicting on you.”

  “It was your fault.”

  “Oh, yes? How’s that?”

  “I talk back to de priest who ask me to confess.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “None o’ your flamin’ business!”

  “Ha! Good for you!”

  Another pleasant pause. Neil knocks the burned tobacco out of his pipe into an ashtray. Refills the bowl with fresh tobacco from a green leather pouch Milo has always loved, tamps it and lights it with a taper drawn from the fire in the fireplace. Sucks slowly and sensuously at his pipe, causing not only the tobacco but the light in the western sky to smolder.

  “And you stuck with your young partner all the way, did you?”

  “. . . Yeah.”

  “That’s the main thing, to be trustworthy. To stand by those who’re counting on you. The worst crime isn’t robbery, Milo. If it were, all of our political leaders would be in jail. The worst crime is treachery, for that is a crime against one’s own soul.”

  “What did you do, Grandad?”

  “Well, you remember I took part in the Rising in Dublin, at Easter 1916. I was a member of the Irish rebels, who’d just then begun to call themselves Sinn Féin. Now, my cousin Thom and I were posted at the entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green, a lovely park in the city center. And on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, who should come striding toward us but Major John MacBride. The major was on our side, but he was also the sworn enemy of Willie Yeats, who for years had been in love with his wife, Maud Gonne. You remember my telling you about her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, Milo’s Mighty Memory! Well, MacBride knew me to be a close friend of the poet’s. Running into me at Saint Stephen’s Green, he suddenly saw his chance of getting back at his rival . . . and he denounced me to the Brits!”

  “How’d he do dat?”

  “Well . . . as the son of Judge Kerrigan, you see, I’d normally have sided with the Empire. So the rebels had decided to use me to infiltrate the enemy ranks and find out what the Brits were planning. I was wearing a British uniform. Can you believe, my boy, that in April 1916, while the First World War was raging across the Channel and all their military strength was needed to fight the Germans, the British deployed forty thousand troops in the city of Dublin?”

  “So, uh . . . was Thom a spy, too?” asks Milo.

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you. He was dead by then.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, a frightful event. The Brits shot him point-blank before my very eyes. But I don’t want to bore you with my veteran’s tales. Suffice it to say that having been denounced by John MacBride, I was arrested, handcuffed, dragged off to Dublin Castle and held in custody there for two long weeks. Had my father not intervened, I should have met with the same sorry fate as the other heroes of the day. Yeats’s famous poem would have been called ‘Seventeen Men’ instead of ‘Sixteen Men.’ A different rhythm indeed!”

  “What? Dey put you in jail for two weeks and you almost got shot by a firing squad and you never told me about dis before?”

  “I thought I should wait until you’d reached manhood, Milo. Now that you’ve been behind bars yourself, I think you can understand.”

  “Den I can tell you what I did when dey let me out last week,” Milo grins.

  “What did you do?”

  “Well . . . when I first got locked up, I tought we were denounced by de blond kid, Augustin his name was, who used to bully Timide and always had it in for me. But my friend Edit’, she come to visit and tell me it was Timide himself who call de cops from a phone boot’, one day when my back was turned! Dat explains why he went straight back to school when we got buste
d, and I got locked up. So . . . first ting I do when dey let me out, I give Edit’ a call . . . She borrow her mom’s Volkswagen and drive me all the way to de school. When we get dere, I crawl in de back of de car and crouch down on de floor to wait . . .”

  (We can do this scene in flashback, with you telling your grandfather the story in voice-over. Of course you neglected to mention what you and Edith had done to Timide in the woodshed on the way down to Montreal . . .)

  “Finally Timide, he come out to smoke on de front steps with Augustin and a coupla oder guys. I’m de one taught him to smoke! . . . I can see he’s de big school hero now, moved way up tanks to his week’s adventure running away wit me. Edit’ call out to him. Hey, Timide, baby! Wanna go for a spin? He hesitate. He still shy, but he want to show off in front of de oder guys. In that jalopy? he say, stalling. Tought you might like a change from lookin’ at priest bums! Edit’ say. So Timide say okay. He come over, get into de passenger seat, Edit’ step on de gas and de car leap away from the kerb. I got my arm round Timide’s troat fore he know what happening. His mout’ pop open and I stuff my handkerchief inside. We drive out to de reservoir. I got a baseball bat in de trunk. We drag Timide out of de Volkswagen and I smash up bot’ his knees.”

  “Y-you did?” gasps Neil, swallowing. “The-then what did you do?”

  “We drop him at de hospital.”

  Milo and Edith shove the broken boy out of the car onto the sidewalk, near a sign that reads HôPITAL SAINTE-MARIE.

  “Well . . . that’s fine, then,” says Neil, clearing his throat. “Long as you dropped him off someplace he could be taken care of . . . You’re right, traitors deserve to be punished, as Polonius tells his son Laertes when he goes off to university. You remember that soliloquy from Hamlet, don’t you? Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.”

  Milo takes over.

  Dose friends dou hast, and deir adoption tried,

  Grapple dem to dy soul wit hoops o’ steel

  But do not dull dy palm wit entertainment

  Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware

  Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

  Bear’t dat de opposed may beware of dee

  “Impeccable!” Neil says, enchanted with his scion. “But my most important advice to you, Milo, comes still and always from Yeats.

  How can they know

  Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

  And there alone, that have no solitude?

  “. . . Never fear solitude, Milo. In this time of political turmoil, beware of Loud Speakers. Remain ever a student.”

  CUT.

  Ripping him out of his reverie, the guard suddenly comes and clangs on the bars with his billy club:

  “Telegram.”

  Milo’s eyes focus. “Yeah?”

  “It’s not mail day but we decided ta do you a favor.”

  “I don’t need your favors.”

  “Okay, you can go to hell.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “Oh, so you want it now? Say please . . .”

  At lightning speed both Milo’s hands are through the bars and around the man’s throat.

  “Hand it over or you’re dead.”

  “Bloody savage,” says the man, handing him the telegram . . .

  (Yes, okay, Milo. The telegram can only be from Marie-Thérèse’s daughter, your cousin Marie-Gabrielle. Though she was closer to you in age, only four years older, she didn’t play as important a role in your life as your male cousins, so I figured we could save a few thousand dollars by leaving her out of the story. But you’re right—no one else in the family could have sent you this message, so we’ll have to go back and put Marie-Gabrielle in everywhere . . .)

  GRANDPA NEIL DIED IN HIS SLEEP ON WEDNESDAY. HIS FUNERAL TOOK PLACE YESTERDAY, IN THE SAME CHURCH WHERE HE MARRIED OUR GRANDMA FIFTY YEARS AGO. THE CHURCH WAS ALMOST EMPTY, NOBODY KNEW HIM ANYMORE. IT WAS SUCH A PITY NOT EVEN YOU WERE THERE, MILO. WHEN WILL YOU BE GETTING OUT THIS TIME? YOUR LOVING COUSIN, GABRIELLE

  The prison gives Milo a day’s leave. We see him heading home through the forest at nightfall. His nose catches a scent. He tenses, then breaks into an animal run. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . Sound track: no panting, only his steps thudding softly on the forest floor, like the soft beating of a drum. In the distance he sees white smoke billowing above black trees. Not the house. Behind the house. He goes around. A towering bonfire. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . Jean-Joseph is tossing armloads of books and papers out the window of Neil’s study on the second floor. François-Joseph is deftly catching them and adding them to the high, hissing flames. Both are singing, laughing, roaring drunk.

  Milo turns on his heel and vanishes.

  In the morning, after walking past the smoldering, smoking, stinking mound of ashes that was once his grandfather’s library, he bursts into the kitchen where his aunt is making hotcakes. As usual, her first reaction is to yell at him.

  “Where have you been, Milo? The boys saw you arrive last night. You sneak up on us like that, you don’t say a word to anyone and then you vanish. We looked for you everywhere!”

  She catches sight of his face and her tone changes. There are now large amounts of air between her words.

  “What . . . what’s wrong with y . . .”

  Milo goes over to the drawer and takes out the sharpest knife.

  “Milo . . . you’re upset about the fire, is that it?”

  He approaches, wielding the knife, expressionless.

  “It was just books, Milo!”

  He advances on her.

  “It was just books! Milo! What was I supposed to do with them? And besides, they were all in English!”

  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 n
ew 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?