Life in the Court of Matane (10 page)

All the fuss and bother began with the launch of a little wooden boat on the St. Lawrence River and ended with an evening bordering on the satanic, in the candle-lit interior of the Saint-Ulric parish church. We had ordered the half-metre-long boat from a village artisan, who fashioned it in the image of the cargo ships we saw pass by from east to west every day, and then from west to east. Our little boat was a carbon copy of the
Hudson Transport
, a cargo ship that caught fire on the Christmas Day before I started fifth grade. Panicked by the flames, the frightened sailors decided to try their luck in a lifeboat, but unfortunately it flipped over on its way down into the water. The sailors tumbled head-first into the icy water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, succumbing to hypothermia in less than ten minutes. The news left the king pensive. The queen was far from reassured by the whole affair. You see, they had begun work on the steel sailboat that was to whisk them off to their tropical dream, and the incident left them feeling jittery. The men who decided to stay aboard the
Hudson Transport
and fight the flames were all rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter. The incident, which I didn't see for myself since it took place several kilometres offshore, marked me for life. It was especially upsetting that the drowned sailors disappeared beneath the ice. The Coast Guard never managed to recover the bodies. I was an eyewitness to this part of the story, though. The police were called every time a body appeared, in all kinds of circumstances. Suicides, accidents, murders, lightning strikes, drownings… it was often Henry VIII who had to deal with them. Sometimes he would describe to us over supper just how putrid the bodies smelled.

The sinking of the
Hudson Transport
and preparations for my confirmation coincided with a family of Asian refugees coming to Saint-Ulric. One day, Madame Nordet announced that we would soon have in our midst a student who didn't speak French. Saint-Ulric would be welcoming a large family from Laos. Laos, she explained, was a country beside Vietnam, bordered by the Mekong. Bloodthirsty communists (another hammer word) had seized power and were persecuting all those who remained faithful to the king, as well as anyone they didn't like the look of. The suffering endured by these poor folk was recounted to us in great detail. Laos, a former French colony, had fallen under the heel of the USSR and had become no place to live. The Canadian government had agreed to take in a number of Laotian refugees and, killing two birds with one stone, made some of them take up residence in the outermost reaches of Quebec, like the Gaspé Peninsula, for at least four years. That way, integration would be easier, and regions that were becoming dangerously depopulated would be given a demographic shot in the arm from the immigration ministry. The logic behind the operation was far from subtle: “No one seems to want to have anything to do with the Gaspé Peninsula anymore. But you don't have much choice, so you'll have to make do. Welcome to Canada.”

I found the whole undertaking extraordinarily romantic. The villagers of Saint-Ulric spent weeks tracking down everything required for a happy household. The people who would soon be staying with us had fled in the middle of the night, bringing nothing but the family jewels with them as they stole across the Mekong. “Family jewels” drew a chuckle from a few of the boys with dirtier minds. I wondered if the Mekong was very wide. How cold was the water? Had they rowed across? Swum? Secretly built a raft? They had then walked to a refugee camp in Thailand, where they had waited patiently for a Canadian visa. Some of the students wanted to know if they had come by boat, like the boat people we saw on the evening news. No, we were told. They had flown to Montreal. Others wanted to know if they had winter over there. The question excited Madame Nordet. “That's just it. They don't know what winter is like at all. They're from a part of the world where it's always warm. That's why we're rustling up tuques and mitts for the poor little darlings—they don't have any at all.” That very evening, we all went through our homes with a fine-tooth comb to track down anything likely to protect a child's body from the cold and communism. The women of Saint-Ulric were instructed to begin knitting on the spot. The wool of a hundred sheep went into mitts, tuques, and scarves to protect the Laotians from the rigours of our winter. They would be living in a big white house by the river. The Mekong for the St. Lawrence. Was one body of water as good as another?

Apart from the Laotians, who were yet to arrive, otherness in our neck of the woods was limited to the sporadic presence of a handful of anglophones from New Brunswick or a few Indians on the Maria reserve. Plenty of families were called McNeil, Murray, or Robinson, but they all had Quebec roots, trunks, and leaves, like the maples in the gospels. They had long since forgotten Ireland and blended right in. Blending in. There was an art to blending in in Saint-Ulric and the other villages along the Gaspé Peninsula. I had learned that soon enough after coming to this school. Don't stand out. Say you like hockey. Don't be different. Madame Nordet showed us a photo of the Laotians who would soon be living among us. I took a good look. It wasn't going to be easy, I told myself silently.

And so it was that, one winter's day, a little Laotian girl joined our class. Almost every class in our little school took in a student from the large family. There were six of them in total. In normal circumstances, they would have gone to Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver. They would never have taken Route 132 to find themselves in Saint-Ulric in the dead of a Quebec winter. Before fleeing north, Mr. Vonvichit, as he was called, had been clerk of the court in Vientiane. So as not to condemn him to idleness, the immigration ministry had found a job for him at the Saint-Ulric peat bog. In a part of the country ravaged by unemployment, this had been enough to raise eyebrows. “A job? What about me?
I
don't have a job, do I?” Echoes of hushed conversations between parents reached me in the schoolyard. Mr. Vonvichit, whose job as clerk of the court in Laos had involved keeping the documents of the court in order, dealing with judges and lawyers, and wearing fancy shoes, now found himself gathering peat in a half-frozen field in eastern Quebec, behind the wheel of a monstrous machine that looked like a huge spider. Irony was not going to spare Mr. Vonvichit. Back in Laos, the Marxist revolutionaries had accused him of being too educated and sucking the blood of the proletariat. They had made his life impossible. When he left Vientiane with his wife and six children, he was about to be shipped off to a re-education camp, a place people generally didn't return from. In Canada, he was now driving a vacuum harvester. The Canadian government had managed to accomplish by peaceful means what the communists would have achieved through violence. Mr. Vonvichit was now a member of the Gaspé Peninsula's proletariat, envied for his stable, well-paid employment.

At school, Madame Nordet wrote the names of Mr. Vonvichit's six children on the blackboard. Phousavan, Anousone, Khonesavanh, Paxathipatai, Nouphone, and Saravan. Our Laotians certainly broke up the monotony of Quebec's first names. We had to learn the names by heart before the family arrived. It was the least we could do. We were then asked to write the Vonvichit family's first names in our notebooks. We had to look up at the blackboard more than once to get them right. The names defied all logic and didn't even tell us the children's sex. The exercise quickly got out of hand. Within minutes, I could hear a couple of girls giggling. Not far from where I was sitting, a mischievous girl from Saint-Ulric had already come up with nicknames for our new friends. A few recesses later and the list of nicknames had done the rounds of the school. The eldest, Phousavan, was christened “Peasant Man,” a name that was petty enough. Poor Anousone, set to join my sister's class, would be called “Anus One.” Khonesavanh, the new girl in my class, was to be “Comment ça va?” And the unfortunate Paxathipatai was burdened with “Paxa Potato.” Cute little Nouphone would be known to us as “New Phone,” while little Saravan, still too young to go to school, would be—yes, you've guessed it—“Caravan.” They hadn't yet set foot on Gaspé soil, and the Vonvichits had already been rechristened. But those among you who believe humour to be a backhanded compliment will be disappointed by the episode that followed. Khonesavanh walked into our classroom on a freezing winter day. Our new classmate had been in Canada for several weeks. She and her family had first been treated for a number of medical conditions. Madame Nordet had told us that the Vonvichits came from a country where people sometimes carried diseases. “Sometimes they don't even know. They're not as lucky as you or I. And don't forget, they've never heard tell of Jesus. They're Buddhists. They believe in reincarnation.”

One morning, the little Laotian girl came into the classroom with the principal. Madame Nordet asked her to stand in front of the class for everyone to get a good look at her. She didn't understand. For ten seconds, we watched her in deathly silence. She had big gentle eyes, long black hair, and smooth-looking skin. She stared at the floor and, after what to her must have seemed like three centuries, took her seat beside a girl by the name of Madone, to whom she had more or less been entrusted. Madone was to take Khonesavanh everywhere, introduce her to her friends, have her try out the swings, and protect her, all of which she managed admirably. She stepped in whenever she heard a lout call the new girl a “Chink,” jeer “Comment ça va?”, or spout forth other improprieties, letting the boor know in no uncertain terms that there would be consequences. Although the treatment dished out to the Laotians deeply saddened me, the attention focused on them spared me attacks by the other boys. Weeks went by without anyone hitting me. No one called me a faggot. The Laotians were attracting all the insults.

The week that Khonesavanh arrived coincided with a class skating trip to the arena in Matane. The poor little girl, terrorized by the huge frozen surface before her, teetered on a pair of old white skates and was dragged around the ice to whoops of joy. Two girls held her by the hand and tried to teach her in ten minutes what they had taken months to learn. Khonesavanh, her eyes wide, staggered across the ice like a puppet with its strings cut, Madone barely managing to keep her on her feet. Disaster was on its way, simply waiting for the right moment to befall us.

A couple of boys began to jostle the little girl, shouted “Comment ça va? Comment ça va?” Surprised, she let go of the hand that was holding her and toppled backward, smacking her head against the ice. A small crowd formed around her. She didn't move.

Beside the blue line on the ice, Madone held her in her arms, her eyes raised to heaven, desperately looking around for Madame Nordet or another adult. A scene of piety that still haunts me to this day.

She had to be taken to the hospital, where the doctors confirmed she had suffered a bad concussion. Madone wanted to die with shame. She blamed the incident on the old white skates, telling anyone who would listen that the blades were blunt, that they hadn't been sharpened properly. Buddhist or not, the little Laotian lived under the protective gaze of Madone, our very own Madonna.

Khonesavanh came back to school, mortified, a few days after the accident. The little Laotians stuck together for those first days among us. They closed off their circle to us, surrounded by noisy kids and risking no more than the odd glance outside the little world they had made for themselves. Sometimes an unflattering nickname would be heard rising out of the mass of students. The five brothers and sisters would tremble with fright, talk among themselves in Laotian, and avoid eye contact with us. The schoolchildren had been strictly forbidden from throwing snowballs, jostling the new arrivals, and
openly
making fun of them. One day, the smallest of the Laotian boys, who can't have been any older than eight, made an extraordinary discovery. As he watched one of his new Québécois schoolmates, he realized that the snow covering the schoolyard was malleable and could be made into balls that could be thrown, painting semi-circles across the sky. He bided his time. Then, one day when a little cretin shoved him, he threw his first snowball, whacking his assailant square on the forehead. From that moment on, the nicknames for the Laotians were virtually never heard again.

The young Vonvichits did not attend catechism class. They left the classroom in the morning to learn French with a teacher who had been taken on by the school board just for them. This lady had grown to love every one of the little refugees and spent many a happy hour teaching them French using pictures. “It's funny how there's money for that, but not for all the rest,” another teacher had commented. Clearly, not everyone was in favour of the Laotians.

By virtue of the agreement with the government, the Vonvichit family spent four years in Saint-Ulric. When the four years were up, they disappeared. Other people moved into the house they'd been living in. Mr. Vonvichit's job was given to a local, and Madone lost her little protégée. “Ungrateful” was the word on everyone's lips. “They got their citizenship and now they're off to the city! What else is new!” If you ask me, they took the most logical migration route, the same one I dreamed of taking myself every night. Sometimes I wonder whatever became of them. Whether, some winter nights, Khonesavanh's thoughts turn to Madone, who watched over her first days in Canada. I wonder if she learned to skate. I also wonder if they ever knew that their coming into my life had shown me there was another world out there, that another life was possible. I'm especially grateful to them for turning the Saint-Ulric welcoming committee's attention away from me, by their mere presence. For a few days at least, they had managed to find someone more different than I was.

Khonesavanh had come into our world just as we were feverishly preparing to receive the breath of the Holy Spirit. The first step of our preparations involved launching the miniature boat, a symbol for our Christian souls, out onto the St. Lawrence. The river that flowed into the ocean represented life. It had storms in store for us, but would also lead us on to brighter shores. Boats launched by students in previous years, we were told, had been found as far away as Newfoundland. The first and last names of all the confirmed were written on a piece of paper and rolled up in a canister that was tightly fastened to the boat, embarking on a voyage on the northern seas that would end up God knows where. A note was added to the list of names, encouraging anyone who might find the boat to throw it back into the sea and allow it to continue its journey among the currents, cod, seals, and glaciers. Madame Nordet showed us a letter from a couple of Newfoundlanders who were delighted to have found one of the boats. We had asked the English teacher to translate it for us. The Newfies assured us that they had returned the boat to the sea, letting it set sail for new ports. Launching the scale model was of the utmost importance to Madame Nordet. First, we had to come up with a name. The choice was to be put to a vote, in keeping with the rules of democracy. Each student was to suggest a name, then we'd all vote for our favourite. We were given a few days to think it over.