INTERVENTION (5 page)

"A ghost!" I wailed. "You're a ghost!"

I can hear the thing's mind-voice laughing even now as it said:

Exactement! Mais un fantôme familier...

Thus I was introduced to the being who would help me, advise me—and bedevil me—at many critical points in my life. The Family Ghost took my hand and drew me along a shadowy, twisted game trail, making me run so fast I was left nearly breathless and forgot to cry. It reassured me but warned me not to mention our meeting to anyone, since I would not be believed. All too probably brother and cousins would laugh at me, call me a baby. It would be much better to tell them how bravely I had faced the bear.

As the first stars began to show, I emerged from the forest onto the road near the fish hatchery where the pickup truck stood. My cousins and the fish men were there and welcomed me with relieved shouts. I told them I had flung my berry bucket in a bear's face, cleverly gaining time to make my escape. None of them noticed that I stank slightly of pipi. My brother Don did look at me strangely, and I was aware of a question hovering just behind his lips. But then he scowled and was silent.

I got double whipped cream on my raspberry slump that night.

I told nobody about the Family Ghost.

***

To understand the mind of our family, you should know something of our heritage.

The Remillards are members of that New England ethnic group, descended from French-Canadians, who are variously called Franco-American, Canado-Américaine, or more simply Canuck. The family name is a fairly common one, now pronounced REM-ih-lard in a straightforward Yankee way. As far as I have been able to discover, no other branches of the family harbored so precocious a set of supravital genetic traits for high metafunction and self-rejuvenation. (The "bodiless" mutagene came from poor Teresa, as I shall relate in due time.)

Our ancestors settled in Québec in the middle 1600s and worked the land as French peasants have done from time immemorial. Like their neighbors they were an industrious, rather bloody-minded folk who looked with scorn upon such novelties as crop rotation and fertilization of the soil. At the same time they were fervent Roman Catholics who regarded it as their sacred duty to have large families. The predictable result, in the harsh climate of the St. Lawrence River Valley, was economic disaster. By the mid-nineteenth century the worn-out, much-subdivided land provided no more than a bare subsistence, no matter how hard the farmers worked. In addition to the struggle required to earn a living, there was also political oppression from the English-speaking government of Canada. An insurrection among the habitants in 1837 was mercilessly crushed by the Canadian army.

But one must not think of these hardy, troublesome people as miserable or downtrodden. Au contraire! They remained indomitable, lusty, and intensely individualistic, cherishing their large families and their stern parish priests. Their devotion to home and religion was more than strong—it was fierce, leading to that solidarity (a species of the coerceive metafaculty) that Milieu anthropologists call ethnic dynamism. The Québec habitants not only survived persecution and a grim environment, they even managed to increase and multiply in it.

At the same time that the French-Canadian population was outstripping the resources of the North, the Industrial Revolution came to the United States. New England rivers were harnessed to provide power for the booming textile mills and there was a great demand for laborers who would work long hours for low salaries. Some of these jobs were taken by the immigrant Irish, themselves refugees from political oppression and economic woe, who were also formidably dynamic. But French-Canadians also responded to the lure of the factories and flocked southward by the tens of thousands to seek their fortunes. The migratory trend continued well into the 1900s.

"Little Canadas" sprang up in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. The newcomers clung to their French language and to much of their traditional culture, and most especially to their Catholic faith. They were thrifty and diligent and their numerous offspring followed the parents into the family occupation. They became American citizens and worked not only as mill-hands but also as carpenters, mechanics, lumberjacks, and keepers of small shops. Most often, only those children who became priests or nuns received higher education. Gradually the French-Canadians began to blend into the American mainstream as other ethnic groups had done. They might have been quite rapidly assimilated—if it hadn't been for the Irish.

Ah, how we Franco-Americans hated the Irish! (You citizens of the Milieu who read this, knowing what you do of the principal human bloodlines for metapsychic operancy, will appreciate the irony.) Both the Irish and the French minorities in New England were Celts, of a passionate and contentious temperament. Both were, in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rivals for the same types of low-status employment. Both had endured persecution in their homelands and social and religious discrimination in America because of their Catholic faith. But the Irish were much more numerous, and they had the tremendous social advantage of speaking the English language—with a rare flair, at that! The Irish parlayed their genius for politicking and self-aggrandizement into domination of the New England Catholic hierarchy, and even took over entire city governments. We Francos were more aloof, politically naive, lacking in what Yankees called "team spirit" because with us it was the family that came first. With our stubbornly held traditions and French language, we became an embarrassment and a political liability to our more ambitious coreligionists. It was an era fraught with anti-Catholic sentiment, in which all Catholics were suspected of being "un-American." So the shrewd Irish-American bishops decreed that stiff-necked Canucks must be forcibly submerged in the great melting-pot. They tried to abolish those parishes and parochial schools where the French language was given first place. They said that we must become like other Americans, let ourselves be assimilated as the other ethnic groups were doing.

Assimilate—intermarry—and the genes for metapsychic operancy would be diluted all unawares! But the great pattern was not to be denied.

We Francos fought the proposed changes with the same obstinacy that had made us the despair of the British Canadians. The actions of those arrogant Irish bishops during the nineteenth century made us more determined than ever to cling to our heritage. And we did. Eventually, the bishops saved face with what were termed "compromises." But we kept our French churches, our schools, and our language. For the most part we continued to marry our own, increasing our homozygosity—concentrating those remarkable genes that would put us in the vanguard of humanity's next great evolutionary leap.

It was not until World War II smashed the old American social structures and prejudices that the Canucks of New England were truly assimilated. Our ethnocentricity melted away almost painlessly in those postwar years of my early childhood. But it had prevailed long enough to produce Don and me ... and the others whose existence we never suspected until long after we reached adulthood.

SOUTH BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, EARTH

2
AUGUST
1953

H
E WAS ON
his way home from the ten-o'clock at Our Lady, toting Sunday papers and some groceries Pa had remembered they were out of, when he got the familiar awful feeling and said to himself: No! I'm outside, away from her. It can't be!

But it was. Sour spit came up in his throat and his knees went wobbly and the shared pain started glowing blue inside his head, the pain of somebody dying who would take him along if he wasn't careful.

But he was outside, in the sunshine. More than six blocks from home, far beyond her reach. It couldn't be her hurting and demanding. Not out here. It never happened out here...

It happened in a dark room, cluttered and musty, where a candle in a blue-glass cup burned in front of one Sorrowful Mother (the one with seven swords through her naked pink heart), and the other one lay on her bed with the beads tangled in her bony fingers and her mind entreating him:
Pray a miracle Kier it's a test you see he always lets those he loves best suffer pray hard you must you must if you don't there'll be no miracle he won't listen...

The full force of the transmitted agony took hold of him as he turned the corner onto D Street. Traffic was fairly heavy even at this early hour, when most of Southie drowsed or marked time until the last Mass let out and the sandlot ballgames got Underway and the taverns opened; but there wasn't another person in sight on the dirty sidewalks—nobody who could be hurting demanding calling—

Not a person. An animal dying.

He saw it halfway down the block, in the gutter in front of McNulty's Dry Cleaning & Alterations. A dog, hit by a car most likely. And Jeez he'd have to go right by it unless he went way around by the playground, and the groceries were so heavy, and it was so rotten hot, and the pleading was irresistible, and he
did
want to see.

It was a mutt without a collar, a white terrier mix with its coat all smeared red and brown with blood and sticky stuff from its insides. Intelligent trustful eyes looked up at him, letting pain flood out. A few yards away in the street was a dark splotch where it had been hit. It had dragged itself to the curb, hindquarters hopelessly crushed.

Kieran O'Connor, nine years old and dressed in his shabby Sunday best, gulped hard to keep from vomiting. The dog was dying. It had to be, the way it was squashed. (Her dying was inside her, not nearly so messy.)

"Hey, fella. Hey, boy. Poor old boy."

The dog's mind projected hurtful love, begging help. He asked it: "You want a miracle?" But it couldn't understand that, of course.

The dog said to him:
Flies.

They were all over the wounded parts, feeding on the clotted blood and shit, and Kieran grunted in revulsion. He could do something about them, at least.

"No miracle," he muttered. He set the bag of groceries and the paper down carefully on the sidewalk and hunkered o-'er the dog, concentrating. As he focused, the iridescent swarm panicked and took wing, and he let them have it in midair. The small green-backed bodies fell onto the hot pavement, lifeless, and Kieran O'Connor smiled through his tears and repeated: "No miracle."

The dog was grateful. Its mind said:
Thirst.

"Say—I got milk!" Kieran pulled the quart bottle out of the grocery bag, tore off the crimped foil cap, and lifted the paper lid, which he licked clean and stowed in his shirt pocket for later. Crouching over the ruined body in the sunshine, holding his breath and letting the pain lose itself inside his own head, he dripped cool milk into the dog's mouth.

"Get well. Stop hurting. Don't die."

The animal made a groaning sound. It was unable to swallow and a white puddle spread under its open jaws. From the brain came a medley of apology and agony, and it clung to him. "Don't," he whispered, afraid. "Please don't. I'm
trying—
"

A shadow fell over the boy and the dog. Kieran looked up, wild-eyed with terror. But it was only Mr. Dugan, a middle-aged bald man in a sweat-rumpled brown suit.

"Oh," said Dugan shortly. "So it's you." He scowled.

"I didn't do it, Mr. Dugan. A car hit it!"

"Well, can't I see that with my own two eyes? And what are you doing messing with it? It's a goner, as any fool can see, and if you don't watch out, it'll bite."

"It won't—"

"Don't sass me, boy! And stop wasting good milk on it. I'll phone the Humane Society when I get home and they'll come and put it out of its misery."

Kieran began to recap the bottle of milk. Tears ran down his flushed face. "How?" he asked.

Dugan threw up his hands impatiently. "Give it something. Put it down, for God's sake. Now
get away irom
it, or I'll be
telling your
Pa."

No!
Kieran said.
You go away! Right now!

Dugan straightened up, turned, and walked away, leaving Kieran kneeling in the filthy gutter, shielding the dog from the sun.

"Put you out of your misery," Kieran whispered, amazed that it could be so simple. |Why did Mom try to make it complicated?) He'd never thought of it that way before. Bugs, yes; he didn't care a hoot about them. The rats, either. But a dog or even a person ...

"You wouldn't take me along, would you?" Kieran asked it warily. The pain-filled eyes widened. "Stop loving me and I'll do it. Let go. Lay off." But the dog persisted in its hold, so finally he reached out and rested his fingertips on its head, between its ears, and did it. Oddly, all of the hairs on the dog's body stiffened for an instant, then went flat. The animal coughed and lay still, and all pain ceased.

Kieran wondered if he should say a prayer. But he felt really rotten, so in the end he just covered the body with the want-ad section of the newspaper. His Pa never bothered with that part.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

I
WAS NOT
to experience another manifestation of the Family Ghost for nearly sixteen years. That first encounter in the twilit woods took on a dreamlike aspect. It might have been forgotten, I suppose, had not the memory been rekindled every time I smelled raspberries or the distinctive pungency of bear scats. But I did not brood on it. Truth to tell, I had more important matters to occupy me: my own developing metafunctions and those of my brother.

I have already mentioned that Don and I were fraternal twins, no more closely related than any singleton brothers. Many years later, Denis told me that if we had both hatched from a single egg, our brains might have been consonant enough to have attained harmonious mental intercourse, instead of the clouded and antagonistic relationship that ultimately prevailed between us. As it was, we were of very different temperaments. Don was always more outgoing and aggressive, while I was introspective. In adulthood we both were tormented by the psychological chasm separating us from normal humanity. I learned to live with it, but Don could not. In this we were like many other natural operants who came after us, our successes and tragedies blending into the ongoing evolutionary trend of the planetary Mind studied so dispassionately by the scientists of the Galactic Milieu.