All the Voices Cry (3 page)

Photographs and translation by Jan McDonald

 

C
OME ON IN, don't be shy. My name is Bernadette. And you are? Jan. So pleased to meet you, Jan. Father René told me that you would stop by. Yes, I always work out here under the carport. I like the sound of rain falling on the roof. You're from Montreal? Toronto. Ah. That's a long way. I have a niece who lives there, on Yonge Street. Twins in a stroller, maybe you have seen her? They're a handful of trouble. Well, this is my summer project—should be finished in the next day or two. Sure, photos are fine. You might find the ground more stable for your tripod over on the path.

These are my tiles and pots and cups, arranged by colour. I do the actual smashing on the concrete, and I shape the pieces afterwards with nippers. I use an outdoors glue to fix the ceramic on the tub. Here's a nice piece of Limoges that Madame Benoit passed on to me. Look at the pink dress on that courtly lady, but see how it's cracked underneath? There's gold paint on it. I'll be using it somewhere special.

Today I prayed that the paint inside my shrine would stay put. I will not be ashamed to ask for that in the church, since my work is to glorify the Mother of Our Lord, so the paint should not flake no matter what I do. Not to say you shouldn't
prime carefully. After all, our God is a busy God. I've seen shrines where the sun gets in and the paint hangs down in sheets around the head of the Holy Mother. She stands there as if she had her head up under a string of washing. Shame.

Mind you, not many people bother to keep up their shrines any more, and I don't know that you're going to find anything other than empty ones around here. These days people prefer deer on their lawns, or roosters or kids fishing. Down on Rue Bonaventure someone has an Olympic Stadium being attacked by a giant polar bear. Not many people feel that much faith any more, or if they do, they keep it in their pockets and not in their gardens, except at Christmas, and then it's the plastic figurines. Violette La Caisse bought an entire set on sale at the hardware store and they faded after two years. You can't make holy things out of plastic.

I've been doing ceramic stars on my bathtub, rays or petals of one colour and centres of another. I stick them on first, and then I fill in the gaps with little bits left over. Mother Mary approves of recycling. She gave birth in a barn, after all, even though where she is now she probably has most things in gold and jasper. I gave her a good clean this morning. She looks nice lying on the grass, doesn't She? Resting. Just like my mother used to have a little siesta after lunch.

I expect Father René told you that I was once a novice. I was about to take my vows when God came to me in a dream. He said go to the general store, so I did. I was so shy! The store was nothing like the supermarkets we have now. You could get anything there. Violette La Caisse was the cashier that day.
Urgel Beauregard from up Lac des Tortues way came in. I didn't know him from Adam, but I heard him say to Violette that his wife had died and would she have him, because he had six children and didn't know what he would do. And Violette said thanks for offering, but she had enough on her hands with the rush on sugar pie orders, and she turned to serve me and I looked up at Urgel's big empty eyes. He drove a truck for the paper mill, and I brought up all those children in this house and we had two more of our own. Good kids. They all pitched in.

Now I'm going to tell you what happened to my son Henri. It's nothing you won't hear from down the road. Still, I'd rather tell you in my own words. People say that divorce is the worst thing that can happen to a family, but there are worse things. It's the same with families as it is with ceramic. You don't quite know how the tile will crack, even if you think you have a rough idea. I'm talking hairline cracks, places where it's ready to break and we can't tell until the hammer comes down. Well, whatever went on used to happen in the vestry. And in the end my boy Henri got so quiet I knew something was up. He was not the only one. And next thing they sent that priest to the South of France so that he could do it all over again in the sun.

When Henri turned sixteen, he went to work in his uncle's fish shop in Montreal. Plenty of boys do it. I suppose they think there's more to life down there. Hard to imagine, isn't it? When we have all this sky up here. But at least he told me he was going—he could have gone to do squeegee like that kid
down the road. I left him alone. You have to let people work things out, but I never stopped wondering how he was, and I never stopped praying for him. He was a good kid.

You know, about this time last year the Virgin Mary appeared to me behind the barn. I was spraying the lettuces with a slug killer that I make by boiling up cigarette butts. It works a charm. Well, all of a sudden I had this feeling that there was a mystery happening beyond the edge of the vegetable patch. And I came around the corner of the barn, and there She was, hovering over the lightning weed. Just small, like a figurine, but shimmering. And she said to me in a voice as low as a mourning dove's,
Find what was lost, renew what has been broken, give the thanks that is due.
I fell down to my knees and I cried and I cried.

Well, what can you do when the Holy Mother calls? I went to Montreal on the bus and stayed with my cousin's friend Rosalia. She lives near the Jean Talon market. So beautiful this market, with the fruit laid out in the shops—pink carrots, pink! There are organic bananas spooning to the left, aubergines spooning to the right, and prickly fruits from Asian countries that I don't even know the name of. I bought a lot of tomatoes for only five dollars, and Rosalia and I spent all afternoon making a sauce called salsa madre, which is very good and has more garlic in it than Urgel would ever let me use at home. I had no problem discovering where Henri was living. He has an apartment in the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, only now it's condos. Early in the morning I sat in the band rotunda in the park, and I saw
them come out of the door, my Henri, and a little boy, and another man.

The boy sat on Henri's shoulders and held onto his ears for balance. Henri's friend held the door open for them, shut it carefully behind them. The urge to get up and run to them, God help me, it was so strong. My feet were rising off the ground, but I held onto the railings with both hands. I watched them walk all the way down the street to the car, a nice car. Then I went back to Rosalia's and got the jars of salsa madre, and then I returned to the church that is now condos. A young man with a ponytail let me into the building. He had a T-shirt on that said “Don't shut me in.” I looked at him and said with my eyes, “Don't shut me out,” and he opened the door, just like that.

Inside, you can't imagine what they have done to the Church of Our Lady. They have built a hotel in there, and left one pew to sit on while you wait for the elevator. Where there should be a stoup, just inside the door, there is a water cooler. And where the Cardinal walked on marble flagstones in 1961, there is carpet and a corridor. Well I've done the same thing in the other direction, me out here turning my bathtub into a sacred place. We're all going in one direction or another, and who's to say it won't become a church again in a hundred years? Likewise, if you needed a bathtub, you could come and dig up one of those empty shrines from down the road.

From Henri's apartment on the fifth floor you can see the whole city. A young woman was there, doing the cleaning. Such a tiny girl from some Asian country. She could see I
was his mother, and she showed me right in. Oh, you have never seen such an apartment! So tidy, so calm, like a monastery, with slanted windows high in the ceiling, and a shining aluminum refrigerator, and a bedroom up a spiral staircase. I delivered my jars of salsa madre, and the girl stood on a chair and put them in an empty cupboard high up, and we lined up the jars just so and closed the doors. Henri will find them on a hungry day, a day when he cannot think what to cook, and he can use that sauce with the vegetables that he might already have.

So that was it. I came home. I don't like Montreal. Too much concrete. But at least I know that he is living in the house and heart of Our Lady, and he is safe. And I am glad, and grateful for Prayers Answered. And so I wait, in case Henri wants to bring that child home to meet his grandmother, because that is the next thing that I will pray for, as I pray for the man who held the door open, and the mother of the child, too, whoever she is. I will wait and watch for Henri to come in his own time, same as I wait for the deer to come out of the forest to eat the new shoots on the field. And then, what a feast we will have.

Look, Jan—I am ready for the
coulis.
What is the word for
coulis
in English? Yes, grout. The colour of this grout is called paprika, which will spice up all that blue and make the yellow bright in the rain. So we mix up the
coulis
with water, until it's thick and sloppy like icing, and then we work it on with a spatula, like this, into the cracks, and then scraping off the excess, and then doing it again. Here we go. And now we give
a good polish with our cloth,
et voilà
, the colours come together and my bath becomes a shrine fit for Our Lady of Lowing Cows, Our Lady of Meltwater, Our Lady of Lightning Weed, Our Lady of Blackened Shingles, Our Lady of the Smelter, Our Lady of Everywhere.

Without the
coulis,
the broken cups and saucers are just that, broken. And without the ceramic, the
coulis
is just wet earth. But put both together, and they glow. The
coulis
is love. We cannot do without it. You have kids, Jan? Just your books of photographs? Well, it's all for the glory. Will you listen to that blackbird? He's up there every evening. Let me wash my hands and I'll make you some coffee. You won't find a better cup down the road.

F
UELLED BY A COFFEE of mythic proportions, Brian Armstrong drove eastwards from Toronto in a mood so foul it made his flesh cold and his armpits sweat. Brian hated site visits in Quebec. Why couldn't Irwin have sent him to photograph the Bahamas project instead? Beyond Montreal there must have been a hundred groundhogs perched on their burrows in the weak spring sunshine or squashed along the sandy shoulders of the road. Brian would have liked to wrap up a few of the riper ones and courier them back to Irwin as a present. Still, in the car he at least felt safe from the hovering clouds of French vowels that swirled in the air outside. The deeper he got into the province, the more roly-poly the French accent would become and the less likely it was that he would ever understand a word of it. Men, women and children: a whole province-full of people talking through a mouthful of steel wool. The main thing was not to stop until he got to the site at Lac Yahoo.

Irwin had assured Brian that the client was an English-speaking photographer from Ontario with a vacation home in Quebec. She wanted an organic look for her new buildings, so there would be trees to save, which he knew Brian would
appreciate. Brian cared less for the trees than Irwin realized. Brian was hoping for a small-waisted, red-maned, green-eyed, fearless photographer. And not just a photographer, but a pilot too, or better still, a trapeze artist. Evidently she was a friend of Vernon Hasp, the film director. Not that Brian ever got invited to those parties. He never went anywhere. Not strictly true. Shortly after the divorce he had visited a resort where he had eaten a bad mussel. He had returned to find his electricity bills strangely elevated because Kelvin had installed a small grow op in the basement.

Kelvin had always been a question-mark kid. Whenever Brian thought about what to do with him, his mind developed black and white static like an old television. The boy might be awake by now, lounging in his chair in the half-light, prisms reflected off the computer screen jiggling their way across the lenses of his glasses. Kelvin was all caught up in some kind of game. He said he had hoards of imaginary charm, plenty of character and wealth stored in the basement computer. Kelvin had lately turned twenty-one but the basement still smelt of socks and apple cores.

Spring rain began to fall and Brian turned on the windshield wipers, found a Vermont radio station and got into the rhythm of the road. He noted a host of white birds feeding in a drowned field beside the river and even found himself able to appreciate the rumpled heads of the nut-brown pampas grass and the barrow-shaped clumps of sumac. Every stalk and bole was tinged with the green-gold of spring sap rising. And as for the billboards advertising local bars, each was a
teenager's dream, dominated by a pair of bronzed goddesses coiled around poles, fully trained in the slithery arts of Bourbon Street and just waiting to entertain the weary trucker or the lonely man from the architectural firm in his crappy car.

For a few kilometres Brian returned to one of his favourite fantasies: a willing woman in a dry sugar shack with a clean floor and no cobwebs. What such a woman would be doing in a sugar shack this late in the season Brian was not sure, but it did not matter. The stickiness and the sweetness were all.

After the rain stopped the margins of the sky lay fringed and ragged with mist along the tops of the birch forest. By his calculations, Brian was not far off from the artists' colony at Lac Whoozie, but the mega-coffee weighed heavily in his bladder. He pulled off onto a side road for four-wheelers. No need to risk going into a café. A quick whiz in the woods and he could be back on the road. He tucked his wallet out of sight, pressed the button to lock the door and shut it firmly. It would be a disaster if the camera were stolen.

A ditch full of pampas grass and a low wire fence lay between him and the woods. He made an awkward leap and got across with only one boot soaked. He stepped over the fence, ducked in behind the trees and stood looking up through the branches as if he had never met himself, while he listened to the stream and sputter on the damp layers of foliage at his feet.