Baloney. Maxime Raymond Bock
with brandy and throats raw from smoke. Their raucous laughter as he slowly, loudly read from one of Denis’s books, following along with his finger, concealed a crude, contagious fury. The recital dragged on at least ten pages, and the boys heard every word, never taking their eyes from the little lumps of crud in their dishwater, even when two lumberjacks poked their heads into the kitchen archway to say, ‘Looks like we got some fiery virgins here, boys,’ and ‘Hey, it’s Mardi Gras, come do a little show for us.’ The young poets tried to decline but felt themselves shoved from behind into the centre of the circle. Over the muttering and clinking of flasks, Denis was forced to read a few pages of Saint-Denys Garneau. He was so parched that each syllable stuck to the roof of his mouth. He felt outside himself as he turned the trembling pages, standing a few inches taller than Robert, much skinnier than other boys his age. His patchy blond moustache was darkened with sweat. Robert felt sorry for him. He also felt violently naked. The book held over his pelvis like a fig leaf afforded no protection. After a mocking ovation, the men demanded more. They were drunk. Insults flew. The pleasure of humiliating wanted only a spark of weakness to flare up. Robert leafed frantically through his William Chapman, tearing out half pages, cracking the leather binding, then pausing a second and breathing deeply before he launched into a passage:
The breakup of the wide Etchemin, that swims
its imprisoned waves under the ice,
And, with a cant hook in hand, proud and strong
floaters drag the heavy logs, stranded on shore
Or on the ice clad, jagged rocks, whole forests
That ran aground, are slid across the freshets
By the valiant woodcutters of Dorchester and their iron
Toward the giant river that carries them to the sea.
It’s been days with no peace nor relief,
The bold log rollers singing while they work.
Turn after turn, on the riverbanks and in their long canoes,
They work on – with all the drive of heroes –
Commanded by a leader with the shoulders of Hercules.
Their job is mighty hard but no one backs down
– The Company name takes the place of a flag –
When they must risk their shirt or their skin …
In a trance, Robert failed to notice the astonishment of the men, who now sat rapt, or the brief silence that descended every time he turned a page. Ayotte put a hand on his shoulder. Robert kept on reading, his cracking voice a grotesque yodel. Ayotte shook him gently. ‘Stop. Go finish the dishes. And make sure the porridge is on time tomorrow. We’ve got to finish cutting the trail along Lac Vert. Before the melt. Understand what that means, son?’ The men went back to their bunks; the boys walked shakily to their quarters. From that night on, the porridge and soup were to the lumberjacks’ liking and the stables were swept and the dishes gleamed. A week later, when the time came for a final run to the cache, Denis, with a notary’s son’s promise of reward, convinced Ayotte to take the boys along. Denis left everything he owned behind. Robert brought his four sheets of paper, folded in his pocket and covered in writing on all eight sides.
2
I think about Robert a lot. I can hear his voice, smell his rank cigarette-and-coffee breath and the greasy stench of his apartment, and feel his frail handshakes and the lightness against my chest during our quick hugs when we greeted and said goodbye. We met a year and a half before he died. It’s not much in a lifetime, just long enough for a damaged creature to quickly complete the business of wasting away. Sometimes, toward the end, what he said had only the slightest purchase on our world and seemed poised to fade to silence after the next comma. He would forget that he had already told me certain stories, and on their second or third tellings they would veer off in different directions, but deep down I knew he spoke truthfully each and every time, more truthfully than me, more truthfully than anyone. He was the one who made me see the vanity of my own life. When I picture him now – his emaciated body and translucent skin, his matted beard and sticky hair, forever wearing the same worn-out jeans and T-shirts, eternally hunched over his coffee table, rolling the cigarettes that ate away at his lungs and caused him to spit up bloody gobs of phlegm, like full stops after the coughing fits that interrupted our discussions every ten minutes – the present comes into focus for me as a single whole, my senses open up and take it all in with no filter, and I concentrate in order to ward off my uneasiness with the idea that as soon as each moment unfolds it’s gone, we can’t take any of it with us, except a faint outline that can only be filled in through imagination. I walk in the park next to my house and on the sidewalk next to the Rivière des Prairies, where families enjoy the still-warm afternoons, though October is upon us. I have fun with my kids, climbing monkey bars and chasing each other around the playground. I strive to be mindful of it all, to push my consciousness to its limit, to soak it all up. It brings me a degree of well-being, makes me feel like part of an indefinable skein of meaning, a great force intelligible only through spirituality, a holistic intuition that draws me in but that I will have no choice but to let go of once I realize that, of everything that has just happened, only spectral traces remain.
At that point, with two manuscripts rejected and a third accepted, subject to an impossible rewrite, by a friend who ran a small press, I had turned my back on poetry. But not on poets. I still went to launches and readings, and sometimes parties – since finishing university and having children, these were my only chances to see this circle of acquaintances, where I still had a few friends. I was now a minor player. I no longer stepped up to the mic to read. A new crop of good-looking young poets with a strong sense of showmanship had arrived on the scene and pushed me to the margins. The esteem certain people had once held me in was rekindled for a while when I published a short collection of wide-ranging stories of uneven quality. It garnered a brief review in one of the papers and a few blog posts. Two or three people told me they’d read and enjoyed it.
I was looking for a way to start writing again and coming up blank. The same words saturated my mind, but their meanings seemed to have evaporated. I could no longer read anything beyond what crossed my desk for copy-editing – poorly conceived advertising, business reports written in gibberish, tourism and mechanics magazines, literary manuscripts scarcely better than my own. My kids were taking over my entire life, sucking me dry to the very marrow; it felt like I was withering away for them while they flourished. Bags were appearing under my eyes, and not even a good night’s sleep, when I actually got one, could make them go away. I lived in terror of my pen. When I sensed the approach of a moment I might be able to spend writing, on weekends when the kids were at their grandparents’ or during nervous nights when I couldn’t take another second of listening to Joannie sleep, I would squander them fucking around on the internet. When Robert came into my life, one June evening in Parc Hochelaga, where the Poetry Van was making its rounds, I had more or less resigned myself to the idea that I would never write another word.
The poets were taking turns at the mic in front of the van, reading from crumpled-up bits of paper, books and magazines. I was spending my evening chasing Chloé, my youngest, through the crowd. In between two performances, while I chatted with an acquaintance, she got away from me again and I found her sitting on a park bench beside an old man. He was looking at her, smiling, a smoke dangling from the corner of his mouth. As I grabbed my daughter I said hi to the old man and thanked him, then promptly forgot all about it. A month later, I recognized him when the Poetry Van stopped in Centre-Sud. He wasn’t just a park regular drawn by a pop-up artistic performance – he’d been following the Poetry Van around town, a constant presence on the outskirts of the crowd, sitting on a bench, just close enough to hear the amplified voices. He didn’t react to the readings, seemed content to sit there smoking and listening. I approached him and he nodded, and asked me why I hadn’t brought my daughter this time. I joked that the family unit could be a prison cell, and I was out on furlough. He showed me