Free Life in the Court of Matane by Eric Dupont Page B

get to the bottom of those violent, messy bouts of travel sickness. Just leaving on a trip with the king and queen was enough to turn me green. And in fact I never felt ill when I travelled with other people. The car would gather speed, the king and queen would light a cigarette at the same time, and less than ten minutes later I would already be green in the back seat, much to the displeasure of the queen, whose tone would become reproachful. Sometimes they would have to stop the car and let me vomit at the side of the road while the queen cursed, “Are you done? What’s taking you so long?” My sister was less given to these moments of weakness than I. Burying my nose in a book would help me delay the inevitable by a minute or two, which meant that I would be sick after Rimouski and not before. I would bury my nose in my book again to forget my vomiting spell.
    According to that same book, the brown-headed cowbird owes its name to its habit of following herds of cows across the farms of North America. Before it followed cows, the cowbird would follow buffalo across the plains, back when it was still called a buffalo bird. Which means that it has never had a name of its own; it’s always been named after the animal it follows. The book also explained that the bird doesn’t build a nest. Just like the cuckoo, it squats in the nests of other birds to lay its eggs.
    My reading was often interrupted by the king pointing out something by the side of the road. Near Rimouski there was, for instance, a big sign for “Monkey Heaven” a few kilometres to the south. The image of monkeys fresh out of the equatorial forest had the power to surprise on these boundless snow-covered stretches of highway. The place was a little like a zoo, but with only monkeys. They lived behind big windows, locked up year round in narrow wooden cages. Visitors would file past the filthy vivariums, home to a handful of sad and panic-stricken baboons looking around for their native Africa. The king explained that the place had been shut down after the authorities received a number of complaints about mistreated monkeys. They were underfed, they got sick, and they were left to die in their grimy cages. The crime appalled me. But I went on with my reading to keep my travel sickness at bay. The book went into great detail on the bird’s parasitic reproductive behaviour. In the spring, the female cowbird lays an egg in another species’ nest. The other mother often doesn’t suspect a thing and sits on the intruder’s egg along with her own. I was beginning to nod off in the back seat. Sleep slowly got the better of me, triggering terrible nightmares populated by starving monkeys and parasitic cowbirds. Books and reality intertwined, and I dreamed I was flying, beating my wings high above Virginia and Massachusetts, heading for Canada. The king woke me up when we arrived at my grandparents’ village.
    Saint-Antonin looks like any one of the hundreds of church-spired villages scattered across Quebec. The difference being that the municipality of Saint-Antonin (the village
and
parish) had a strange bylaw: bores were not tolerated. At the entrance to the village, a kindly guard leaned his head into each car to be sure it didn’t contain anyone on his list. It was like a scene out of the Soviet Union. The guards had an almost infallible technique for sniffing out stuffed shirts. As the car slowly pulled up to the sentry box, one of the guards would follow the other’s every movement, like the mime artists who practice their art in shopping malls. When the first guard realized what he was up to, he would turn and slap him hard across the face. A ferocious battle royal ensued.
    If the people inside the car began to laugh, the barrier was raised immediately to let them through. If they remained impassive in the face of such antics, their identity was checked. Such searches had been known to take hours. If, by some