VI AND I
Someone hauled the luggage for my mother.
I was excited.
The sounds were hard, parts of the machine. Black smoke lost itself somewhere, rolling up there, in the vault.
The man made his iron beast snort a white cloud of steam as I passed by.
I laughed. He waved his hand.
And then the wires sunk and saved themselves clutching another pole and they sunk again by the railroad.
I felt the rhythm of the train in my legs.
I enjoyed trying to stand straight as the train tossed me.
I whistled in my head responding to the blast of the beast.
The men on the train were nice.
They took care of me.
Later I learned that the men on the train were black.
We were going down to Vi's in Maine.
The geese went the other way.
It was an evening when I heard Vi say in the language of the poor, of those forced into ignorance, one word in French the next in English, two ideas … or is it …
I heard Vi sob. I heard Vi cry.
I heard her say she did not have a language.
She despised herself for crossing la street pour aller au post office.
I know Vi loved me.
Once, Vi gave me the spare change she could not spare.
We walked on the tracks from Keegan to Van Buren.
We laughed and played and tiptoed and jumped along the tracks to go to the cinema, the boys and I.
Maggie took us back.
Maggie drove a taxi. She owned it. She had the language.
She was a mother for a few miles.
Paul did not drink when I was there.
I heard Vi tell my mother.
Paul was a millwright.
Paul had left his youth, his strength, his health in the mill. He searched for his mind in the bottle's bottom.
It was more of life having happened to Vi and Paul than their living it.
They and their people had harvested the misery that came to grow in the potato fields.
Paul blew a mean harmonica.
I danced in his slippers.
The slippers did not move .
The hardships blurred when Vi built towers of ployes every morning on the coldest corner of the woodstove.
Paul and Vi were the rubble left behind by a beetle that swept away the fields. Or was it a fungus?
But those are days the child left in me remembers fondly.
It is this childhood that doesn’t yet know sadness,
structural sadness,
despair,
social despair or that the men on the train are black.
A child learns sadness from the fly he takes apart and discovers that death is permanent.
So there we were in Keegan, some days in Van Buren and other days in Canada over the bridge to Saint-Léonard,
to buy meat.
And I saw a plane pass under the bridge.
I was excited.
Then the cousins crawled out from under the misery.
They climbed up.
The potato fields did not hurt anymore those of the little French Ireland.
Connecticut, Massachusetts was their holygrail.
There the water came from faucets.
They climbed up.
It was not better times, better communities.
It was only better companies.
They bit some of the apple pie promised in the American dream.
They did not dent it.
But they had crawled out and were climbing some rungs.
Very few.
Just enough to see that there was an under them,
an away from them,
a back there and then.
And they knew English well. They spoke white.
That was probably why they could, they thought, emerge.
They knew English better than French, any French, especially Vi's French.
They now spoke what was spoken at the top of whatever they thought they were climbing on.
The language held up in Vi's arms, in Vi's dreams, was dying in Maine.
It was now dead in Massachusetts and Connecticut .
A life later I phoned Vi and talked with her, and Vi, with a heaving heart, spoke French
and it still was only as she could and she apologized.
And she listened to me, she paid so much attention to what I was saying,
she was proud somehow
that I was French but could speak white,
that I was what she could, would have been.
Vi was ill now.
I knew that,
we both knew that these were our last smiles, the last time we would share the memories of my stepping in Paul's slippers and the boys teasing me.
It was the last time the memories resurrected like the wires along the rails. Then they dropped forever.
French had become less than a minority language,
it became a folklore,
a cultural decoration, stripped of usefulness like the horse plow by the side of the road on which dangles a rural mailbox.
And one night, in this age, because of fond memories playing like a movie, sounding like a radio in an old man's mind, I telephoned a cousin.
And we spoke English.
Vi's language had passed at the moment she died.
I remember Vi smiling, her eyes tender, eyes for me, the child, and again, much later on the phone.
She cuddled me and fed me ployes , now mere pancakes
and scowled my cousins when they teased me.
When I succeed in putting on my child's head,
I remember the better days
festooning the bitter days
of the Acadian Hard Times.
Footnote:
This text opens a window on a private tragedy in a culture smothered by an economic collapse. It says in a diatribe as soft as a diatribe can be that there is no poverty as tragic as being deprived of a language, as being condemned to ignorance. There is no tragedy greater than never having the creative words, "Let there be well-being," and there is well-being. The harsh years, the "Acadian hard times" (a title published by the University of Maine Press, subtitle "The Farm Security Administration in Maine's St-John Valley, 1940-1943") of the early 1940s in Maine are well documented. Vi, in my view, did not make it into the documentation.
Her name was Viola.
She was my aunt.
She must be known. They should all be known, the Vi's of our world.