About
eight o'clock they woke with a
start. Amazed and
confused, she
shrank from the unexpectedness other waking. She wasn't
dreaming. It was
true. She had been married the day before and was waking up with her
husband in a bed in the neighbour's house. He was pushing back his hair and
swearing as he painfully lifted his head. He had gone to bed dead
drunk.
"You cannot refuse," they said.
"After all, you are the bridegroom."
Halfway through the
evening he was drunk already and a
shock of brown hair had fallen forward over his face without his making any effort at all to throw it back with a shake of his head as he usually did. Shifting from leg to leg, her
senses blunted with sleep, she watched, heavy-eyed, the progress of the
festivity, diverted from time to time by the almost wild
pleasure he was taking in his own
wedding feast.
Since it was her wedding too, she
resolutely stayed awake, all the while envying her
cousin who slept
peacefully, her head against the corner of the wall. They were the same age:
thirteen-and-a-half. At that age sleep could be
pardoned, she had heard them say again and again. Of course, but not on the night of one's wedding.
It was long after midnight when at last he signalled her to follow him. They went through the
garden so that no one could see them or play mean
tricks on them. She helped him to jump over the
fence, to cross the
ditch, and to climb the
stairs. He fell across the bed and began to snore at once, his hands clenched like a child's. He was
eighteen. She slept, curled round on an empty corner of the
mattress.
They got up quickly as soon as they woke,
ashamed to have stayed in bed long. He ran to
hitch up a buggy which he drove around in front of his in-laws' house. His wife's
trunk was loaded on and he helped her up. He was
embarrassed; she, almost
joyful. Then he turned the horse at a
trot towards the
property that had been prepared for them. He was to be the second
neighbour down the road. She waved happily again and again and her mother, who, crying, kept watching,until they had rounded the corner, the blond braid that swung like a pendulum over the back of the buggy seat.
All day they worked eagerly getting settled. In the evening they went to bed
early. He
embraced her
eagerly.
Face to face with a
heat that
flamed and entangled her in its curious movement, she was
frightened.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
He answered quietly,
"You are the sheep and I am the ram."
"Oh," she said. It was simple when one had a
reference point.
On the first
mornings of their life together, after he had left for the
fields, she ran quickly to her
mother's.
"Are you managing?" her mother always asked.
"Yes," the child replied smiling.
"Your husband, is he good to you?"
"Oh yes," she said.
"He says I am a pretty sheep."
Sheep... sheep? The mother,
fascinated, watched her daughter attentively but did not dare to question her further.
"Go back to your husband now," she said.
"Busy yourself about the house and get his meal ready."
Since the girl
hesitated uncertainly as if she did not understand, her mother sprinkled
sugar on a slice of bread spread with
cream, gave it to her and pushed
her gently toward the
door. The child went down the road eating her bread and the mother, reassured, leaned
sadly against the wall of the house watching the thick swaying
braid until the girl turned the corner of the road.
Little by little the young
wife spaced her visits. In
autumn when the cold rain began to fall, she came only on
Sundays. She had found her own
rhythm. Was she
too
eager, too
ambitious? Perhaps she was simply inattentive. Her
tempo was too swift. She always hurried now. She wove more bed covers than her chest could hold, cultivated more
vegetables than they could eat, raised more calves than they knew how to sell.
And the children came quickly—almost faster than
nature permits. She was never seen without a child in her arms, one in her belly, and another at her heels. She raised them well,
mechanically, without counting them; accepted them as the
seasons are accepted; watched them leave, not with
fatalism or
resignation but
steadfast and untroubled, always face to face with the
ineluctable cycle that makes
the apple fall when it is
ripe.
The simple mechanism she had set in motion did not falter. She was the
cog wheel that had no right to oversee the whole machine.
Everything went well.
Only the rhythm was too fast. She outstripped the seasons. The begetting other children pressed unreasonably on that of her
grandchildren and the
order was broken; her daughters and her sons already had many children when she was still bearing others — giving her
grandsons
uncles who were younger than they were and for whom they could have no
respect.
She had
twenty-three children. It was
extravagant.
Fortunately, as one child was carried in the front door,
beribboned and wailing, one went out the rear door alone, its
knapsack on its back. Nevertheless, it was extravagant. She never realized it.
When her husband was buried and her youngest son married, she caught her
breath, decided finally on slippers and a
rocking chair. The mechanism could not
adjust to a new rhythm. It broke down. She found herself disoriented,
incapable of directing the
stranger she had become, whom she did not know, who turned round and round with outstretched arms, more and more agitated.
"And if I should visit my family?" she asked her neighbour one day. She had children settled in the four corners of the
province, some even
exiled to the
United States. She would go to take the
census or, rather, she would go like a
bishop to make the rounds of the
diocese.
She had been seen leaving one morning, walking slowly. She had climbed into the
bus, a small black cardboard suitcase in her hand. She had smiled at her neighbours but her eyes were still
haggard.
She went first to the States. She was introduced to the wife of her grandson who spoke no
French and to all the others whom she looked at searchingly.
"That one," she said,
"is she my child or my child's child?"
The
generations had become confused. She no longer knew.
She went back to
Sept-Isles. One day, when she was rocking on the
veranda with one of her sons, he pointed out a big dark-haired young man who was coming down the street.
"Look, mother," her son said.
"He is my youngest." He was eighteen and a shock of hair fell forward over his face.
She began to cry.
"It is he," she said.
"It is my husband."
The next day she was taken to the home of one of her
daughters, whom she called by her
sister's name. Her daughter took care of her for several days and
then took her to the house of the other daughter who, after much kindness, took her to the home of one of the oldest of the grandsons. She asked no questions. She cried.
Finally, one of her boys,
chaplain in a home for the aged, came to get her. She followed him
obediently. When he presented her to the assembled community, she turned to him and said quietly,
"Tell me, are all these your brothers?"