those before-and-after moments. The gods saw it. That’s why they stuck the two of them out there on that spit for a while — to let things really soak in. To make sure the changes took.
I don’t know how it worked for Gord exactly. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t a prick before then. Maybe the insult of it all — the unsociable Indians, the boiled goose, the wrecked, tit-imprinted sweater, is what pushed him over the edge; maybe before that he’d just been another lovable leprechaun of a working man. Like I said, I don’t know. It’s not a story Gord ever told. It was a story Sylvie told.
So I know how it worked for Sylvie — and I know exactly when it happened for her.
Sylvie used to begin the story on the Saturday just before they got stuck. She had wandered off on her own across a marsh (in her hip waders, natch) because she had grown tired of Gord talking all the time and telling her what to do and then always taking the shot before she could. (“I just get so excited,” he’d apologize afterward.) So she wandered off on her own, not too far, she promised the guides, and sat for a while in a clearing on the other side of the marsh, kept just cool enough — even in her heavy waders and long underwear — by the relentless, whipping wind, and just warm enough thanks to the blazing October sunshine settling across her skin like a cat across a lap.
Wilderness. Sylvie in the wild, hat pulled down, wind in her ears. I like to picture her like that. She stayed there for the next hour, she told me, because it was so peaceful. She got one goose — it practically landed at her feet — and then another, which plopped into the middle of the marsh. Well it was time to get going anyway. She felt the freezing water strain against the rubber of her waders, hugging her legs like pleading children, as she sloshed forward to get the second goose.
But just a few steps in, something bucked at her side, almost throwing her off balance and into the drink. It was goose number one, still kicking at life.
Criss! she yelped, grabbing at it.
But goose number one had no interest in being groped. Goose number one had come to, discovered itself to be gut-shot, dangling from some Frenchwoman’s scrawny shoulder, and was entirely taken aback. It made its feelings known to my mother.
She sloshed her way back to solid ground holding the thrashing goose out in front of her, barely able to keep it still.
For all her experience in the bush, this had never happened before. Usually when Sylvie made a creature dead, it could be counted upon to stay that way. Not this guy, though. Reason being, Adam: this was a gift from the above-mentioned gods — a honking, feathery thunderbolt, if you will. Celestial provocation.
“I was gonna have to break his neck,” Sylvie related to me whenever she got to this point in the story. “I thought to myself, Câline de bine, I’m gonna have to break his neck.”
There was always something poignant about my mother’s bestowal of gender upon the goose (in which case I guess I should say gander). You might think this was her French-speaker’s habit of sexing every noun — but Sylvie had spoken English right alongside of French her whole life and never had that habit. I believe it was just my mother’s way of getting across the intimacy of that moment. The fact that she had found herself confronted with a being, an individual — how else to put it: a dude. A dude whose outraged, flappy-winged life she needed to extinguish then and there. There was no way she could make it back across the marsh with a thrashing goose in tow.
So she began to throttle the goose.
Creak! Went the divine Barcaloungers, shifting forward in unison.
I remember her first telling me this story when I was ten or so, and I remember feeling at this point in the narrative exactly what I’m feeling now, as I tell it to you. A dread. A kind of teetering feeling, like a car halfway over a cliff.
“But I couldn’t choke him.”
What do you mean you couldn’t choke him? You felt bad? You showed it mercy?
“No I mean he just . . . wouldn’t choke.”
It wouldn’t die! Sylvie throttled and throttled the snowy bastard, and still it kicked, still