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collect his merchandise here than to have to tear it from the ground like a miner? Alas, he noticed the building was fitted with an alarm system beyond his abilities to circumvent: tiny cameras in the ceiling corners and motion sensors on every window and door. And as Uncle pointed out, here the corpses would be missed immediately. But Grandfather couldn’t get over the feeling of being let into a bank vault. He fled the parlour “for a smoke,” which he sucked on like an infant at a bottle.
    Passersby saw him tremble and jerk the cigarette in and out of his mouth, saw his discomfort in the suit, saw him standing before the funeral home, and murmured their condolences on their way. Grandfather wondered what they were on about.
    Until Grandmother’s recent demise, Jean-Baptiste had never actually known a dead person. Now, with Angus, it was still a novel enough experience to inspire a glut of new poems which—because they were about the death of his grandfather and because he was so young—were atrocious. But he loved them enough to want to print them himself and hand them around to anyone who would take them. Eventually he had enough to fill a small pamphlet, and began to think of how and where he could find the paper and ink he needed.
    In the meantime, he decided it couldn’t hurt to submit some of these new works to local magazines—even if there were no chance of acceptance. The problem, he knew, was that he just wasn’t sociable enough to become part of the right circles. Which was obviously the only way anybody got published, especially locally. Everybody knew everyone else and they all published one another in their reviews and magazines, and went to each other’s readings and launches, and wrote about each other in the local newspaper, which made them all seem very worldly and important. And no one bothered over whether their work was really any good or whether it was enjoyed by anyone but themselves.
    Jean-Baptiste knew the real problem was that they didn’t recognize good work when it bit them, because they never read anything but each other’s work, and because they watched too much television. The anglophone literary community of Montreal was very small. Although they had heard of people like Calvino and Goethe and Bulgakov, they thought these people were foreign dictators or film stars. Therefore Jean-Baptiste was quite surprised to receive a reply from an editor who, while rejecting the poems he had sent, offered encouragement, asked to see more work and invited him round for a chat.
    “I feel a little like Artaud,” Jean-Baptiste said as he sat opposite the editor.
    “Who?” the editor asked.
    “Never mind,” said Jean-Baptiste.
    The men borrowed a truck and moved Angus’s things to the basement. Mother wanted to sort through them, knowing she’d discover much of it difficult to discard. She spent days below ground looking at brown photos by the light of an unshaded bulb, trying to bring herself to throw out old shirts, opening letters he’d kept from people she’d never heard of. And then closing them again as if afraid of being caught.
    When Father suggested it was really getting time to begin disposing of some things, she protested.
    “No, not yet. It’s so comforting having them near. Later, in the spring.” For once, Father didn’t press her.
    But Angus’s boxes in the basement were no comfort to Marie. They were a secret torment she dared not share with anyone. It mattered little to her that others had died or been injured. She’d expected that—she had wanted that. It didn’t even matter so much that someone she knew personally, her own grandfather, had died. Truth to tell, she hadn’t liked him very much. He was too much of an Anglo. Too much of a slave to his masters, who preyed on his simple ideas of how the world worked. And used him, as he thanked them for it. If he’d been smarter or more clear-sighted, she could at least have respected him personally, even if he was