Our stove sat under the beam painted with shiny CN-train paint and hung with a copy of The Angelus. All the kitchen chairs had the same paint because Monsieur Blanchard brought it home free from the station when he was done his shifts. He stole it, all the conductors did. They all stole paint and they all died on the railway one way or another—after Monsieur Blanchard was gone, Madame Blanchard and I had the house to ourselves. I played with Louis, Lolly and Madarin while Madame Blanchard went to council meetings—our town council had no men in it, all women, because what man wanted to manage a pot with no money?

At my first school dance the other boys picked girlfriends—Gérard Cormier and René Vaillancourt pursued Emilie Callaghan. I was not very interested in girls then either, at least not in getting them behind the Coke machine and kissing them, though I did sit with them on Wednesdays when Madame Blanchard gave me money for hot chicken pie. I liked talking to girls a lot better than boys.

I did not run to the front of the class the day soldiers brought the tank and guns, though I was glad the soldiers had come: our blackboard had a terrible new math problem on it that I did not think I’d ever decipher—I remember cadet recruitment came as a blessed diversion.

They brought fifteen rifles—and they let us take turns aiming them.

I aimed mine at my sunflower in our biology corner. When the other boys aimed theirs at Miss Cranton I felt sick even if she was not my favourite teacher. I wished I could swivel the guns away from her but you don’t do that to Gérard or René or Alphonse and Elzéar Huet or you end up with a face-full of gravel like the peanut bits in an Eat-More bar.

No.

What attracted me were not the gun barrels, nor the tank the soldiers rolled up to our classroom windows…it frightened me: a faceless, mechanical grasshopper. Nor was I enthralled or intrigued by the soldier who did all the talking, though he wore red and gold gorgets and had his photo on page one of the Gaspé SPEC. He promised college, with our fees paid by military scholarship. All we had to do was sign and get our mothers to sign. There was no need to fear we might not measure up—there was state-of-the-art training in Bagotville and Valcartier. We all knew about these camps. Brothers and cousins had packed their bags after secondaire cinq and boarded the Valcartier bus and kissed their moms goodbye.

Mothers have it hard in a situation like that.