Read Online Black Bird by Michel Basilieres - Free Book Online Page B

panicked. For a second she was still; inside, Grandfather’s feet slid on the kitchen linoleum as he struggled to brace himself, instinctively squeezing the crow’s breast between his hands—not to disable her, but as if it would somehow steady him. Breathless, Grace let out a mournful rasp, reached over to Grandfather’s red, strained face and plucked out his left eye.
    The bird nested on the roof and hung over the house like an ominous cloud. She swirled joyfully in the air through the uproar: Grandfather’s pitiful screams, the resultant howling and barking of Uncle’s dog, the shocked exclamations of the family as they came rushing to the kitchen, even the whine of the ambulance pulling up to the door. She followed to the hospital on the mountain, circling the ambulance all the way, cawing in rhythm with the rise and fall of the siren. She circled and pecked at all the windows until she found him lying in a public ward. And she sat herself down on the nearest window ledge, waiting.
    She caused a little stir on the ward, the nurses and other patients wondering at this marvel. Grandfather explained, “That bird has my eye.”
    “Oh yes,” said a nurse, smirking. “I see the resemblance.”

    Before the Quiet Revolution—when Quebec woke from the Great Darkness imposed by the Catholic Church, big business and the Duplessis government—the Royal Victoria Hospital was known as a good medical clinic. Afterwards, it was known as one of Montreal’s Great Anglophone Institutions, and climbed up the slopes of the mountain slowly. From the original red stone structure it spread into newer wings and outbuildings, aligning itself with another Great Anglophone Institution, McGill University, for which it became a teaching hospital. Now it served the larger downtown community of immigrants, Anglos and francophones without discrimination. But like so many other aspects of what was in spirit a late-colonial society, it failed to recognize the current place it held in the milieu.
    Up the hill to the corner of University and Pine avenues was the first and lowest of the buildings composing the complex—the oncology clinic; just above it was the original main building, now given over to general practice and administration; higher still, the women’s pavilion; and finally, hidden back and up behind a few stands of trees and sloping lawns, the Allen Memorial—the psychiatric unit.
    From bottom to top, almost as if on purpose, almost as if reflecting a moral hierarchy, the hospital mapped out a spiritual ladder. First and lowest: cancer, darkest and most frightening of diseases and swiftly becoming one of the most common. Then, only slightly more elevated, only slightly less horrific,came the bureaucracy no institution can survive without—literally the backbone without which it would all collapse into a shapeless, purposeless mass. Above this, the maternity unit, that place where all mysterious ventures either up or down start, where the shocking fact of Being begins in pain and fear, despite all the medical establishment’s desperate attempts to contain, control and neutralize the essential and primal nature of our births. Weighing down upon this, as if in warning, the Allen. The psychiatric unit. The mental hospital. Madness. Above birth, above the regulated normalcy of life, above the lurking of cancer; more frightening than all of these, hidden by its height and least understood, hardest to deal with of all human conditions because it denies all others validity.
    On the mountain only two things lay above the house of madness. First, the cemeteries, and then, above everything, the cross.
    Through the frosted glass the dark silhouette of the crow shuffled back and forth on the outer sill, protecting her perch from pigeons, and every now and then scraping away the frozen condensation with her beak—now to Grandfather’s mind so like a scythe—and pressing a single eye to the glass, reassuring herself that Grandfather still