Nancy Huston - Black Dance

“There’s my mother,” says Milo, stretching out an arm. “See? I told you we’d make it! She’s right there.”

The following second, in close-up, we see his body snap into a state of unbearable alertness. Pressed against the earth, his skin and flesh have sensed the vibration of a motor vehicle. Now his rearview vision records the silent blue flash of a revolving light. . and before Timide realizes what’s going on, the two of them have been roughly cuffed and shoved into the backseat of a police van.

HOW SHOULD WE film your jail stints, Astuto?

The nice thing about prisons as compared with closets is that you get to meet other prisoners. It was within the walls of that juvenile detention home that you first met and talked with Indians. At school you’d learned oodles of things about the British and the French and their proud, heroic, capitalist descendants in North America. . but about the native inhabitants of this land? Nothing but colorful shreds of phony folklore. The more Indians you met, the madder you got. Never in human history, it seemed to you, had a people so utterly accepted its defeat. The problem was that in addition to having had their land stolen and their way of life destroyed, Indian men had seen their youngest and prettiest women snatched away by swarms of ugly, aggressive, bearded, foul-smelling, land-hungry, profit-seeking white men — who, moreover, having crossed the ocean womanless, were as horny as bulls — so that within a couple of decades there was a huge métis-blood population. Undone, Indian men had basically locked themselves away for the past three hundred years in a resentful, alcoholic silence. Yeah, I know, Milo, protests and petitions by native Canadians managed to make a few improvements in the second half of the twentieth century, but basically it was way too little way too late. .

WE COME UPON our hero in his grandfather’s study. Close-up on his face at age sixteen: detention has changed him.

“So they put handcuffs on you, did they?”

Milo nods.

“A surprising sensation, isn’t it? Unforgettable.”

“You were arrested once, Grandpa?”

“I was, yes. But I was a grown man by then, several years older than you are now. You’ve always been precocious, eh, whippersnapper? First you skipped two grades at school and then you skipped straight to the juvenile delinquents’ home, without even stopping off at reform school along the way.”

“Dey’re talking of sending me to a reform school now.”

Neil puffs away at his pipe and rocks in his rocking chair, taking his time. Both men are happy and neither is impatient.

“What did you do, Grandpa?”

“We’ll come round to that. I can see why you ran away from that boarding school, Milo, given the punishments they’d been inflicting on you.”

“It was your fault.”

“Oh, yes? How’s that?”

“I talk back to de priest who ask me to confess.”

“What did you tell him?”

“None o’ your flamin’ business!”

“Ha! Good for you!”

Another pleasant pause. Neil knocks the burned tobacco out of his pipe into an ashtray. Refills the bowl with fresh tobacco from a green leather pouch Milo has always loved, tamps it and lights it with a taper drawn from the fire in the fireplace. Sucks slowly and sensuously at his pipe, causing not only the tobacco but the light in the western sky to smolder.

“And you stuck with your young partner all the way, did you?”

“. . Yeah.”

“That’s the main thing, to be trustworthy. To stand by those who’re counting on you. The worst crime isn’t robbery, Milo. If it were, all of our political leaders would be in jail. The worst crime is treachery, for that is a crime against one’s own soul.”

“What did you do, Grandad?”

“Well, you remember I took part in the Rising in Dublin, at Easter 1916. I was a member of the Irish rebels, who’d just then begun to call themselves Sinn Féin. Now, my cousin Thom and I were posted at the entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green, a lovely park in the city center. And on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, who should come striding toward us but Major John MacBride. The major was on our side, but he was also the sworn enemy of Willie Yeats, who for years had been in love with his wife, Maud Gonne. You remember my telling you about her?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, Milo’s Mighty Memory! Well, MacBride knew me to be a close friend of the poet’s. Running into me at Saint Stephen’s Green, he suddenly saw his chance of getting back at his rival. . and he denounced me to the Brits!”

“How’d he do dat?”

“Well. . as the son of Judge Kerrigan, you see, I’d normally have sided with the Empire. So the rebels had decided to use me to infiltrate the enemy ranks and find out what the Brits were planning. I was wearing a British uniform. Can you believe, my boy, that in April 1916, while the First World War was raging across the Channel and all their military strength was needed to fight the Germans, the British deployed forty thousand troops in the city of Dublin?”

“So, uh. . was Thom a spy, too?” asks Milo.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you. He was dead by then.”

“What?”

“Yes, a frightful event. The Brits shot him point-blank before my very eyes. But I don’t want to bore you with my veteran’s tales. Suffice it to say that having been denounced by John MacBride, I was arrested, handcuffed, dragged off to Dublin Castle and held in custody there for two long weeks. Had my father not intervened, I should have met with the same sorry fate as the other heroes of the day. Yeats’s famous poem would have been called ‘Seventeen Men’ instead of ‘Sixteen Men.’ A different rhythm indeed!”

“What? Dey put you in jail for two weeks and you almost got shot by a firing squad and you never told me about dis before?”

“I thought I should wait until you’d reached manhood, Milo. Now that you’ve been behind bars yourself, I think you can understand.”

“Den I can tell you what I did when dey let me out last week,” Milo grins.

“What did you do?”

“Well. . when I first got locked up, I tought we were denounced by de blond kid, Augustin his name was, who used to bully Timide and always had it in for me. But my friend Edit’, she come to visit and tell me it was Timide himself who call de cops from a phone boot’, one day when my back was turned! Dat explains why he went straight back to school when we got busted, and I got locked up. So. . first ting I do when dey let me out, I give Edit’ a call. . She borrow her mom’s Volkswagen and drive me all the way to de school. When we get dere, I crawl in de back of de car and crouch down on de floor to wait. .”

(We can do this scene in flashback, with you telling your grandfather the story in voice-over. Of course you neglected to mention what you and Edith had done to Timide in the woodshed on the way down to Montreal. .)

“Finally Timide, he come out to smoke on de front steps with Augustin and a coupla oder guys. I’m de one taught him to smoke!. . I can see he’s de big school hero now, moved way up tanks to his week’s adventure running away wit me. Edit’ call out to him. Hey, Timide, baby! Wanna go for a spin? He hesitate. He still shy, but he want to show off in front of de oder guys. In that jalopy? he say, stalling. Tought you might like a change from lookin’ at priest bums! Edit’ say. So Timide say okay. He come over, get into de passenger seat, Edit’ step on de gas and de car leap away from the kerb. I got my arm round Timide’s troat fore he know what happening. His mout’ pop open and I stuff my handkerchief inside. We drive out to de reservoir. I got a baseball bat in de trunk. We drag Timide out of de Volkswagen and I smash up bot’ his knees.”