Free The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories by Roch Carrier Page B

Texas. Monsieur Juste, trembling, asked the Postmaster to translate it for him. The I-Don’t-Know-What Company in Texas was buyingMonsieur Juste’s invention; it was ordering 2,500 dozen Anti-Cow-Kicks!
    Monsieur Juste had hardly arrived back home when the fire began to roar in his forge. The hammer began to strike the anvil again, feverish amid Monsieur Juste’s shouts of joy. It was late at night and the hammer was still striking the anvil. Then it was silent for a few hours until, long before the birds began to sing, the hammer started ringing out again. On Sunday the shop was silent, but the hammer struck the anvil at the same time the clock struck midnight.
    After seven days of strenuous labour, Monsieur Juste had made seven dozen Anti-Cow-Kicks. The company in Texas had ordered 2,500 dozen! Monsieur Juste put down his hammer.
    â€˜I’m ruined’, he said.

Perhaps the Trees Do Travel

    T HERE WERE THOSE who had travelled like migratory birds and those who lived rooted to the earth, like trees. Some had gone very far. I remember hearing the story of a man who had gone to the place where the sky meets the earth: he’d had to bend down so he wouldn’t bump his head against the sky. The man had suddenly felt lonely and he’d written to his wife. The stamp cost a thousand dollars. Some people had gone to New York; another visited a brother in Montana; my grandfather had sailed on the Atlantic Ocean; a family had migrated to Saskatchewan; and men went to cut timber in the forests of Maine or Abitibi. When these people came home in their new clothes, even the trees on the main street were a little envious of the travellers.
    And there were those who had never gone away. Like old Herménégilde. He was so old he’d seen the first house being built in our village. He was old, but his mustache was still completely black. It was a huge mustache that hid his nose, his mouth and his chin. I can still see old Herménégilde’s mustache like a big black cloud over our village. Our parents used to say of him that he was healthy as a horse; all the storms of life had been unable to bend his upright, solidpride. At the end of his life he possessed nothing but a small frame house. All his children were gone. Old Herménégilde had spent his whole life without ever going outside the village limits. And he was very proud of having lived that way, rooted to the soil of our village. To indicate the full extent of his pride he would say:
    â€˜I’ve lived my whole life and never needed strangers!’
    Old Herménégilde had never gone running off to the distant forests, he had never gone to the neighbouring villages to buy or sell animals. He’d found his wife in the village. Old Herménégilde used to say:
    â€˜The good Lord gave us everything we need to get by right here in our village! How come people have to go running off somewheres else where it ain’t no better?’
    He recalled a proverb written by a very old French poet and repeated it in his own way:
    â€˜The fellow next door’s grass always looks a heck of a lot greener than your own.’
    Old Herménégilde had never been inside an automobile.
    â€˜I’m in no rush to die’, he said. ‘I want to do it on foot, like a man.’
    One morning a black car longer than the one driven by Monsieur Cassidy, the undertaker, stopped with a jolt in front of old Herménégilde’s house. A son he hadn’t seen for a good many years got out of the car, all dressed in black, as Monsieur Cassidy usually was.
    â€˜You coming to my burial, my boy?’ asked old Herménégilde.
    â€˜No’, said the son. ‘I came to take you on a trip.’
    Moving from one trade, one job to another, the son had become the private chauffeur to a businessman from Montreal;before he could ask himself what was happening, old Herménégilde, who had never been in a car before, was pushed