Free Black Dance by Nancy Huston Page B

don’t want you running off at the mouth again with your bullshit bilingual notions, do you hear me?”
    â€œHow can he be expected to learn?” Neil protests, stroking his beard. “The poor kid doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.”
    â€œHe’ll learn as he goes along, like everybody else.”
    â€œGotta be patient,” Régis suggests, his mouth three or four centimeters away from his bowl of soup. (Régis is a cowed man who seems perpetually to be ducking, even when not bent over to eat.) “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he adds, so softly as to be inaudible to all but us.
    â€œSo where did this Anglo cousin come from?” queries François-Joseph.
    â€œYeah, Grandad, where’d you dig him up? ‘S not every day you get to meet a cousin who’s already eight years old!”
    â€œHe’s Declan’s boy . . .”
    â€œWho else?” grumbles Marie-Thérèse.
    â€œBut where’s he kept him all these years? We never saw Uncle Declan with a kid . . .”
    â€œI had no idea, either,” says Neil. “Declan came over last week to try to wangle some money out of me . . .”
    â€œNothin’ new about that,” observes Marie-Thérèse.
    â€œJust as you say! I told him he’d exhausted my patience, to say nothing of his credit . . . So to force me to give in, he wound up telling me the fifty bucks weren’t for him. Claimed he needed the money for his son’s pension . . .”
    â€œDoesn’t it just break your heart?” says Marie-Thérèse, shaking her head.
    â€œI didn’t believe him myself. Come on, I told him, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes with tall tales like that! Where is this so-called son of yours?”
    â€œA miracle he could even remember, after so many whiskys . . .”
    â€œWell it turned out to be a miracle indeed! He fished out the child’s birth certificate and a whole slew of official papers . . . Believe it or not, Milo had been in five different foster families and Declan had never lost track of him . . .”
    â€œGood heavens!”
    â€œYou were in five different families?”
    Milo shrugs, gaze trained on his plate. He can tell the conversation revolves around him, but the gist of it escapes him.
    â€œWhy’d they move him around so much?”
    â€œBeats me. But the idea that a grandson of mine had been living in Montreal all this time without my knowing about it . . . well, I just couldn’t stand it. I had to go get him.”
    â€œI understand,” Régis mutters. “You did the right thing.”
    â€œJust makes one more mouth for us to feed!” Marie-Thérèse sighs.
    â€œOh, one mouth more or less,” says Neil.
    â€œEasy to say, for people who have their noses in books all day long,” says Marie-Thérèse. “The rest of us work hard to make ends meet!”
    â€œCome on, now, Marie-Thérèse!” says Neil. “I couldn’t leave him in a Protestant household!”
    This is his last card, but it’s a joker and he knows it. Of all the tales of his youth in Ireland with which Neil had regaled the family when Marie-Thérèse was little, the one about the stolen children had made the deepest impression on her. During the endless merciless strike that had paralyzed and famished the entire city of Dublin in 1913, British soldiers had gone stomping into strikers’ homes, kidnapped their children and shipped them off to Great Britain to be taken in by Protestant families. And what honest Catholic worker could bear the prospect of finding himself with a stubborn, glitter-eyed little Protestant at his own kitchen table? They’d returned to the factories . . .
    After dinner, Milo’s cousins take him on a guided tour of the farm. Close-up on their great rubber boots squelching in the mud as he follows them across the barnyard. In the barn, he recoils at