The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories Read online

  The Hockey Sweater

  and other stories

  Novels by Roch Carrier, in translation by Sheila Fischman available from Anansi

  La Guerre, Yes Sir! (1970)

  Floralie, Where Are You? (1971)

  Is It the Sun, Philibert? (1972)

  They Won’t Demolish Me! (1974)

  The Garden of Delights (1978)

  Roch Carrier was born in 1937 in Sainte-Justine-de-Dorchester, Quebec. He holds a doctorate from the University of Paris and has taught literature for many years. He is the author of seven novels, numerous short stories, and dramatic adaptations of his novels. At present he lives in Montreal where he is a full-time writer.

  Sheila Fischman was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Her excellent translations have been widely praised by the critics, and in 1975 she won the Canada Council’s Translation Award for her work on They Won’t Demolish Me! She has been Literary Editor of the Montreal Star.

  The Hockey Sweater

  and other stories

  ROCH CARRIER

  Copyright © 1979 House of Anansi Press Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

  or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in French in 1979 as

  Les Enfants du bonhomme dans la lune

  First published in English in 1979 by

  House of Anansi Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2003 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.anansi.ca

  Distributed in Canada by

  Publishers Group Canada

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  Distributed in the United States by

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  07 06 05 04 03 6 7 8 9 10

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Carrier, Roch, 1937-

  [Enfants du bonhomme dans la lune. English]

  The hockey sweater and other stories

  (Anansi fiction series; AF 40)

  Translation of: Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune

  ISBN 0-88784-078-7

  I. Title. II. Title: Enfants du bonhomme dans la lune.

  English. III. Series.

  PS8505.A77E5413 1979 C843.’54 C79-094584-3

  PQ3919.2.C25E513 1979

  Hockey sweater courtesy of

  Adelkind & Fischman, Elgin, Ontario

  Cover design: David Montle

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program

  the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada

  through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Contents

  The Nun Who Returned to Ireland

  The Shoemaker

  Idiot Death

  The Machine for Detecting Everything That’s American

  The Day I Became an Apostate

  The Month of the Dead

  Son of a Smaller Hero

  Pierrette’s Bumps

  When the Taxes Split the Roof

  The Hockey Sweater

  Foxes Need Fresh Water

  A Great Hunter

  What Language Do Bears Speak?

  Industry in Our Village

  Perhaps the Trees Do Travel

  The Good People and The Bad People

  Do Medals Float on the Ocean?

  Grandfather’s Fear

  The Sorcerer

  A Secret Lost in the Water

  The Nun Who Returned to Ireland

  AFTER my first day of school I ran back to the house, holding out my reader.

  ‘Mama, I learned how to read!’ I announced.

  ‘This is an important day,’ she replied; ‘I want your father to be here to see.’

  We waited for him. I waited as I’d never waited before. And as soon as his step rang out on the floor of the gallery, my first reader was open on my knees and my finger was pointing to the first letter in a short sentence.

  ‘Your son learned to read today,’ my mother declared through the screen door. She was as excited as I.

  ‘Well, well!’ said my father. ‘Things happen fast nowadays. Pretty soon, son, you’ll be able to do like me — read the newspaper upside down in your sleep!’

  ‘Listen to me!’ I said.

  And I read the sentence I’d learned in school that day, from Sister Brigitte. But instead of picking me up and lifting me in his arms, my father looked at my mother and my mother didn’t come and kiss her little boy who’d learned to read so quickly.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ my father asked.

  ‘I’d say it sounds like English,’ said my mother. ‘Show me your book.’ (She read the sentence I’d learned to decipher.) ‘I’d say you’re reading as if you were English. Start again.’

  I reread the short sentence.

  ‘You’re reading with an English accent!’ my mother exclaimed.

  ‘I’m reading the way Sister Brigitte taught me.’

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s learning his own mother tongue in English,’ my father protested.

  I had noticed that Sister Brigitte didn’t speak the way we did, but that was quite natural because we all knew that nuns don’t do anything the way other people do: they didn’t dress like everybody else, they didn’t get married, they didn’t have children and they always lived in hiding. But as far as knowing whether Sister Brigitte had an English accent, how could I? I’d never heard a single word of English.

  Over the next few days I learned that she hadn’t been born in our village; it seemed very strange that someone could live in the village without being born there, because everyone else in the village had been born in the village.

  Our parents weren’t very pleased that their children were learning to read their mother tongue with an English accent. In whispers, they started to say that Sister Brigitte was Irish - that she hadn’t even been born in Canada. Monsieur Cassidy, the undertaker, was Irish too, but he’d been born in the village, while Sister Brigitte had come from Ireland.

  ‘Where’s Ireland?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘It’s a very small, very green little country in the ocean, far, far away.’

  As our reading lessons proceeded I took pains to pronounce the vowels as Sister Brigitte did, to emphasize the same syllables as she; I was so impatient to read the books my uncles brought back from their far-off colleges. Suddenly it was important for me to know.

  ‘Sister Brigitte, where’s Ireland?’

  She put down her book.

  ‘Ireland is the country where my parents were born, and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. And I was born in Ireland too. I was a little girl in Ireland. When I was a child like you I lived in Ireland. We had horses and sheep. Then the Lord asked me to become his servant…’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The Lord asked me if I wanted to become a nun. I said yes. So then I left my family and I forgot Ireland and my
village.’

  ‘Forgot your village?’

  I could see in her eyes that she didn’t want to answer my question.

  ‘Ever since, I’ve been teaching young children. Some of the children who were your age when I taught them are grandparents now, old grandparents.’

  Sister Brigitte’s face, surrounded by her starched coif, had no age; I learned that she was old, very old, because she had been a teacher to grandparents.

  ‘Have you ever gone back to Ireland?’

  ‘God didn’t want to send me back.’

  ‘You must miss your country.’

  ‘God asked me to teach little children to read and write so every child could read the great book of life.’

  ‘Sister Brigitte, you’re older than our grandparents! Will you go back to Ireland before you die?’

  The old nun must have known from my expression that death was so remote for me I could speak of it quite innocently, as I would speak of the grass or the sky. She said simply:

  ‘Let’s go on with our reading. School children in Ireland aren’t as disorderly as you.’

  All that autumn we applied ourselves to our reading; by December we could read the brief texts Sister Brigitte wrote on the blackboard herself, in a pious script we tried awkwardly to imitate; in every text the word Ireland always appeared. It was by writing the word Ireland that I learned to form a capital I.

  After Christmas holidays Sister Brigitte wasn’t at the classroom door to greet us; she was sick. From our parents’ whispers we learned that Sister Brigitte had lost her memory. We weren’t surprised. We knew that old people always lose their memories and Sister Brigitte was an old person because she had been a teacher to grandparents.

  Late in January, the nuns in the convent discovered that Sister Brigitte had left her room. They looked everywhere for her, in all the rooms and all the classrooms. Outside, a storm was blowing gusts of snow and wind; you couldn’t see Heaven or earth, as they said. Sister Brigitte, who had spent the last few weeks in her bed, had fled into the storm. Some men from the village spotted her black form in the blizzard: beneath her vast mantle she was barefoot. When the men asked her where she was going, Sister Brigitte replied in English that she was going home, to Ireland.

  The Shoemaker

  BEFORE we bought our house it had belonged to a shoemaker who died in it when he was very old. My mother described him to us: short and bent over because he’d spent his whole life stitching leather. The little shoemaker limped: he had a clubfoot and one leg was shorter than the other. He made his own shoes because he wouldn’t have been able to find in any store the small, thick-soled boot shaped like a horse’s hoof for his crippled foot.

  There was a very low attic on the top of the lean-to attached to our house. That was where our mother used to store boxes of clothing that would be worn by the other children when they arrived. She would let us climb up the stepladder with her. With our heads jutting through the opening in the ceiling, our glances would fall on boxes, suitcases, old magazines, framed photographs - things in the attic which, in the beam of the flashlight, seemed to be whispering secrets. Perched on the stepladder, with my head in a trapdoor which was scarcely higher than the attic floor, I would ascend into a dream from which my mother had to snatch me away. Climbing down the stepladder, I would always return from it a little dazed. In one corner of the attic was a pile of the shoemaker’s tools. They didn’t belong to us. The tools were waiting as though the shoemaker would come back and use them: rolled-up strips of leather, shoes to which he hadn’t had time to attach the soles, spindles of thread, punches, an awl, a currier’s beam with long wooden tongs that held the leather as he sewed it, a tripod, shoemaker’s knives. My mother explained what all the tools were used for, but she didn’t touch them. Often at night, before I fell asleep, I thought about the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who had lived in our house and died there, and whose tools were still waiting for him.

  In those days we knew that man dies only to be reborn. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that if the little shoemaker’s tools were still in our attic — and his leather and his thread — he would come back to carry on his trade. The roof cracked, a nail creaked in the wood: in my bed I knew that the little shoemaker had returned. I burrowed deep in the mattress and pulled the sheet over my head. I fell asleep.

  One morning I saw my shoes by the bed, with brand new soles made of fine, shiny leather; the worn-down heels had been replaced; my shoes were new again.

  ‘Who did that?’ I cried as I ran down the stairs. ‘My shoes look even nicer than when they were new!’

  ‘Your shoes were so worn-out it was a disgrace,’ said my mother, who was feeding my little brother from a spoon. ‘Last night while you were asleep I took them to the new shoemaker.’

  I went back up to my room, suspecting my mother hadn’t told me the truth. There are so many things that parents don’t want to tell children, so many things they refused to explain to me, so many things I couldn’t understand till I was grown up. This time, though, I guessed. I knew, even though my mother hadn’t wanted to tell me the truth. During the night my shoes had been repaired by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot!

  I left for school earlier than usual. There was something in our village more important than the sun shining down on us: my shoes. Their gleam was more dazzling than the September morning. I didn’t walk to school, nor did I run: I flew. My new soles, sewn on by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who had come back to earth at night to ply his trade in our house, didn’t really rest on the ground the way cows’ feet did, or horses,’ or my schoolmates’: they made me fly, though I still looked like someone who was walking. I knew, though, that I was flying. I had been initiated into one of the great mysteries that dwell in the night. I knew that the little shoemaker with the clubfoot had come, I’d heard him limp, heard him pick up his tools and put them down in the attic.

  Everyone at our school wore shoes. The nuns wouldn’t have tolerated a barefoot student and no mother would dare send a barefoot child to the village school. In the schools on the concession roads more than a mile from the village, little schools built beside the dusty gravel roads, many of the children didn’t wear shoes, but we who went to the village school proudly wore shoes. It wasn’t until after school that the children of large families would take their shoes off so as not to wear them out too much.

  When I arrived in the schoolyard the others immediately noticed my shoes. My classmates came closer to look at them. I went to stand against the big willow, the boys’ meeting place, to show them off.

  ‘You got new shoes!’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I have to wear my brother’s shoes when they get too small for him, but when they’re too small for him they’re too worn out for me.’

  I began to explain, sitting on the books I carried in a canvas bag.

  ‘These aren’t new shoes. They’re my old ones. While I was asleep…’

  And I told my schoolmates, sitting on their books like me, how my shoes had been rebuilt in the night by the little shoemaker with the clubfoot who used to live in our house before he died, and whose tools were still there.

  A harsh laugh struck me like a slap in the face, interrupting my story; one of the big boys had come over to listen to me and he was laughing, holding his stomach.

  ‘Listen to him! Did the atomic bomb land on your head?’

  A few days earlier the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and it had burned alive thousands of women, men and children.

  We heard about it on the radio, L’Action catholique had probably written something about it on the front page and my parents had most likely talked about the article in L’Action catholique — but I have to admit that I don’t remember Hiroshima.

  I searched through my memory, trying to find that childhood day, the way you search page by page, paragraph by paragraph, for a passage in a book you’ve already read. But instead of recalling something that bu
rned so brightly it could have set fire to a corner of my memory, painfully, all I could remember of that autumn day was the little shoemaker with the clubfoot.

  That gap in my recollections still irritates me, but a man likely doesn’t choose what will come to haunt his memory.

  In the next life, when the people of Hiroshima remember this earth, they will see again the bright explosion that wrenched their bodies from their souls. But I wish they could remember instead a little shoemaker with a clubfoot who, as they were sleeping, came and mended shoes worn out from having played too much on the earth covered with dandelions and daisies.

  Idiot Death

  SOMETIMES as he was dunking a cookie in his tea, my father would announce:

  ‘Tomorrow, son, you’re coming with me; it’ll do you good to see something of life.’

  The next day we would set off in his black Ford and behind us the village, like a hat on the mountaintop, was erased in the dust of the gravel road. We drove down roads where, often, there wasn’t even any dust because they were dirt roads and always damp. The car advanced slowly, its belly getting caught in the ruts, while along the road from time to time a frame house turned grey by time would appear in a space chewed out of the dense forest: a flock of children would burst out and come running to watch us pass. These children of all ages, barefoot, wore clothes too big for them, that looked to me like sacks. My father said:

  ‘The good Lord, he’s fair, but he didn’t make everybody rich.’

  After giving me a few moments’ silence to think about this he added:

  ‘Duplessis hasn’t even given them electricity.’

  For me, this meant that in the evening all the children would do their homework around the same table, lit by a single oil lamp: so many children around a single table on which, earlier, they had eaten a porridge, which was what I’d been told poor people ate. Often, my father would stop and go into the house to talk with the father. The children would approach our car and come and look at me. I didn’t like the way they smelled of the stable. Often they’d invite me to get out so they could show me a car they’d built out of old wheels, and they’d show me tame animals — snakes, a squirrel, an owl. When I came back to the village my head would be buzzing.