Fade (7 page)

The shop whistles blew in the distance, five o'clock, the end of the workday. The whistles of Frenchtown always blew at once, the deep bellow from the Monument Comb Shop, the piercing tones of the Wachusum Shirt Company, and the short blurts, like someone in agony, from the Royal Button Company. Carried on the summer air, the whistles created a strange kind of harmony, harsh and out of tune yet blending together, like the cries of all the workers down the hallways of the years, protesting the long hours, the blistering heat, the aches and the pains, the frustrations and the losses. The whistles were the sound of Frenchtown and I sometimes hear them in my dreams.

I looked at my aunt and said: “Why did you do that? Why did you put my hand there?”

“Because I love you, Paul. In my own way. You mean more to me than Rudolphe Toubert. If he can touch me there, then why not you?” There was a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “I wanted to give you something to remember me by. Even though it was wrong, of course. But then I'm always doing the wrong thing, I guess….”

A blue jay's cry pierced the stillness of the afternoon, as if to coax the factory whistles back.

“It's time to go, Paul,” my aunt Rosanna said.

I followed my aunt Rosanna across the narrow bridge. She walked barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hand, her stockings in her purse. We walked home slowly, nodding to the weary, sweat-soaked workers as they returned from the shops, their shadows long on the sidewalks, their movements languid in the failing heat of the day.

At the corner of Mechanic and Sixth, my aunt and I parted. She smiled tenderly at me, touched my cheek with her hand.

When I reached home, my mother greeted me with the news that my uncle Adelard, that elusive traveler, had returned to Frenchtown and was waiting for us to visit that night at my grandfather's house.

y uncle Adelard's homecomings were always a treat for the family, even for those who, like my uncle Victor, didn't approve of his wanderings and thought he should settle down in Frenchtown, marry and have children. When he arrived, excitement spread through the family and everyone gathered at my grandfather's house to listen to his stories and pepper him with questions. I sat on the floor, at my aunt Rosanna's feet, enthralled to be in his presence, thrilled to be so close to my aunt yet barely able to raise my eyes to hers when I thought back to that moment with her in the Meadow.

My uncle Adelard stood in the doorway, tall and thin, in old clothes that seemed faded from the sun and worn out with use. His face was the same as his clothes, pale and faded, eyes sunken into deep sockets. Listening to him intently, I realized after a while that he did not so much tell stories as answer questions, patiently and dutifully, as if this were some kind of debt he must pay, an ordeal he must endure.

“Yes,” he said, answering my cousin Jules, “the West is like what you see in cowboy pictures. The rolling hills and the plains. But what the movies don't show is the cold. It's always hot in the movies and the cowboys gallop over the prairies in the heat, and the sun is always shining. But last year in Montana on the Fourth of July, it snowed—sure, melting as soon as it hit the ground—but snow all the same.”

“Were you a cowboy?” I asked, the question popping out as unplanned as a hiccough.

Everyone laughed and I blushed and my aunt Rosanna reached out and tousled my hair, her touch like a caress.

Uncle Adelard looked down at me and smiled, his eyes crinkling as he did so. “Well, I rode a horse a few times and we had cows where I worked for a while so, yes, maybe I was a cowboy, Paul. I did carpenter work, though, fixing the fences in the corrals. You've heard of chuckwagons? Well, we had a chuckwagon but the food was so bad that I had the runs one whole summer….”

We all laughed, and I was delighted that he remembered my name. I wondered if I ought to press my luck and ask him about the photograph. Then decided not to, afraid to appear foolish in front of the family, knowing my uncle's reputation for avoiding straight answers.

As he continued to ponder other questions—“Did you see the Golden Gate Bridge?” and “Is it true the Mississippi is so wide you can't see across it?”—I studied him closely and noticed the way he held himself apart from all of us between the piazza and the hallway, as if he needed space around him. He talked in matter-of-fact fashion about his travels without exhibiting any excitement over great cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. “They're like Monument, only bigger,” he said. Was he joking or was he serious? If he did not seem charmed by the places he visited why did he keep going, year after year, always moving on, moving on?

There comes a moment when evening passes into nighttime and people begin to stifle yawns and stretch their legs. The shops waited tomorrow and the workers never stayed up late in the middle of the week.

My father finally stood up, my baby sister, Rose, sleeping floppily in his arms, a doll with dangling limbs. “Well, Del, we're glad you're home. It's good to have you back….”

The others murmured assent as they rose and prepared to depart. My uncle Victor flung his arm around his younger brother's shoulders and pecked him on the cheek. “I can get you a job at the shop anytime you say,” he said, but there was good humor in his words and it was evident that he did not expect Adelard to take him up on the proposal.

“Time for confession,” my mother proclaimed one Saturday morning.

I flinched at the dreaded words but had known they were inevitable. During the school year the nuns marched us once a month to the church, where we confessed our sins. The confessions were torture. You whispered your sins to the priest, your lips close to the screen, conscious of the priest listening intently, inches away. You were aware of your classmates in the nearby pews, waiting their turn, afraid your voice would float through the trembling curtain, carrying your words of disgrace to their ears.

During vacation, those agonizing confessions were suspended, although at least once during the summer my mother dispatched us to the church. Armand and I always protested. Summer Saturdays were busy with baseball and movies and chores around the house, too busy for confession. My mother was adamant. “Bad things happen in the summer. People get struck by lightning. The LeLonde boy drowned last year. Do you want to go straight to hell if, God forbid, you missed confession?”

I looked out the kitchen window as Armand carried the argument. I was aware of the sins piling up inside me, staining my soul. The worst sin had always been that sly act at night in bed when I summoned the visions that brought me both ecstasy and shame. I had routinely confessed them, enduring the humiliation of the priest's scolding—“God does not love the impure of heart”—as well as the entire rosary to be recited as a penance. But now I carried with me a sin beyond all my others. I had held a woman's breast in my hand. This was more than impure thoughts in the dark and the touching of my own body. Surely, a mortal sin.

Armand and I trudged to the church that afternoon and stepped into the shadowed stillness, our sneakers padding over the cement floor.

“We'll never get out of here,” Armand whispered, pointing to the people kneeling patiently in the pews. “What a crowd.”

Actually, there was not much of a crowd.

The thought struck me: Did he also have sins he did not want to confess?

“What happens if we skip confession?” I asked, aghast at my boldness.

“Nothing,” he said. “That's not a sin.”

“But we'll have to lie if Ma asks us if we went.”

“We'll just confess it the next time,” he said with complete logic.

We huddled indecisively in the corner, inhaling the scent of incense and burning candles. I'll save my money and light a twenty-five-cent candle next week to make up for it, I promised silently. A new thought intervened: “How about tomorrow morning?” I whispered. “We won't be able to receive communion.”

Armand shrugged. “We'll get up early and go to the seven o'clock mass. Ma and Pa always go to the ten …”

More deception. More sins.

“Come on,” Armand urged over his shoulder as he headed toward the doorway. Outside, in the sunlight, I watched him as he galloped away whooping with delight. While I stood there, conscious of my soul blackened with sin, yet limp with relief at having postponed that terrible moment in the confessional.

A few minutes later I was back in church again, kneeling in a remote corner, reciting an entire Rosary—a total of five Our Fathers and fifty Hail Marys—hoping this might spare me hell if somehow I did not survive the summer.

On the way home, I recited an extra ten Hail Marys. As insurance.

In the next few days, my uncle Adelard visited the homes of his brothers and sisters, taking a dinner here or a supper there, and everyone brought out the best silverware and served a Sunday kind of meal. At my house, my mother made
tourtière,
that French-Canadian meat pie usually reserved for holidays, even though it was summer. The pie was my uncle's favorite and he said my mother made the best
tourtière
in the world.

We sat at the big table in the dining room, reserved usually for holidays and special occasions, and my uncle ate like a starving man, the food disappearing so fast that it seemed he swallowed without even chewing. He glanced up once to see us all watching him in awe.

“You learn to eat fast on the road,” he said, “because you never know when you'll be interrupted.”

I felt his eyes resting on me once in a while and I looked shyly away, pleased that he had noticed me. My mother said that he always inquired about me in the occasional letters he wrote. “He says you are the sensitive one,” she explained when I appeared puzzled by his attention.

During the meal, Uncle Adelard directed questions to each of my brothers and sisters, inquiring about school and such, polite queries that drew ordinary responses although Armand said defiantly that he couldn't wait to quit school and work in the comb shop, as my father shook his head. It was an old family argument because my father wanted Armand to continue with his schooling. No one in the Moreaux family had ever graduated from high school—all my cousins had ended their education at the age of fourteen to enter the shops—and my father was adamant that his sons and daughters would break that pattern. Much to Armand's dismay.

Finally, Uncle Adelard's eyes fell upon me and lingered.

“And you, Paul,” he said. “Do you still write your poems?”

I squirmed and blushed and found my food impossible to swallow. I was stuck with a mouthful of
tourtière
but managed to nod my head and somehow utter one word, “Yes.” Although my brothers and sisters seemed to be enjoying my discomfort, I was secretly pleased that my uncle Adelard knew about my poetry.

“Just think, Lou,” Uncle Adelard said to my father. “A Frenchtown boy who's a writer. Someday, we'll be proud that he's one of us. Can you imagine what it will be like, to go to the library downtown and see a book there written by Paul Moreaux?”

By Paul Moreaux.

The prospect dazzled me and I spent the rest of the meal unable to eat—food was unimportant, even the apple pie and whipped cream for dessert—envisioning myself as a famous writer traveling the world and coming home to Frenchtown, where I would be greeted by cheering crowds when my train pulled into the depot downtown.

“Ah, Elise,” Uncle Adelard said to my mother as he pushed his empty dessert plate away from him. “This is what I miss when I'm away, and worth traveling a thousand miles for….”

A thousand miles. How I envied him, the sights he had seen, the people he had met, the secrets he must harbor in his heart.

After the meal, he and my father sat near the kitchen window while my mother cleared the table and washed the dishes with the help of my sisters. My father asked my uncle about working conditions in other parts of the country. “Not very good,” Uncle Adelard said. “But it would be worse without F.D.R. in the White House.” My father raised his glass of beer. “To Roosevelt, the greatest president of them all,” he proclaimed. “Abe Lincoln wasn't too bad either,” my uncle said, clinking his glass against my father's.

Not interested in politics, I went to the bedroom and picked up
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
which I had already read several times. I could not keep my mind on that exciting and terror-filled chase through the caves because I kept wondering whether I would have the courage to ask my uncle about the photograph while he was here in our house.

A few minutes later, his shadow fell across the bedroom doorway. I put down the book and looked up at him. Did I dare?

“I have something for you,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “A letter. From your aunt Rosanna …”

His expression told me that the letter contained the news I dreaded to hear. “She's going away,” I said.

He nodded. “You are very special to her, Paul. She didn't leave a letter for anyone else.”

I felt somehow that he knew of my burden—the burden of love, the burden of departures, the burden of not having what you wish most in life to have.

He touched my shoulder, his hand lingering there for a moment, and then he left, sensing perhaps that I wanted to be alone, needed to be alone at that moment.