Read The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories for Free Online Page A

turning the pages.
    I discovered that the United States was a truly amazing country because they knew how to print such beautiful magazines, while in Quebec the newspapers only knew howto take pictures of Cardinal Villeneuve or Maurice Duplessis in his old hat.
    â€˜In the United States,’ Lapin explained, ‘the streets are full of girls like that!’
    â€˜There can’t be many Catholics in that country,’ I said.
    â€˜In the Protestant religion there’s no such thing as sin.’
    As I couldn’t leave for the United States immediately to become a Protestant, I went back to school the next day as usual. That morning, I played ball with the others. When Pierrette came into the schoolyard I put the ball on the ground and watched her go past with the same expression in my eyes as the big boys.

When the Taxes Split the Roof

    N EW BROTHERS and sisters kept arriving endlessly; we had to enlarge our house. With vulgar words that burned our children’s souls, the workmen scraped the cedar shingles off our house, knocked down the walls and blocked up the windows; beside new wood, hundred-year-old planks awoke from their sleep. It smelled good, like the forest, as though sap had travelled between the grooves joining the old wood to the new.
    Then came the day when the workmen took off the roof. We were asleep in our beds at the usual hour, as we were every night. Our beds were in their proper places but our ceiling was the starry sky. Although our mother had taken from the chest woollen blankets, which, in wintertime, protected us from the threats of strong winds, we shivered as though we were about to sprout wings. Never had we seen the sky so vast. At times I had to clutch my blankets so I wouldn’t topple into the enormous well. We had learned in school that there are more stars in the sky than there are flowers on earth. Each golden dot in the depths of the sky was billions of millions times bigger than I. Beneath the sky I was a grain of dust that the slightest wind could have sweptaway; my hands clung to the blankets. Everything was good again. I listened to the good Lord breathing in His heaven. Why had He not given the children wings so they could soar from one star to another? Once again my bed seemed unstable, drifting on the blue water of the night; and again I clutched the sheets. Around me my brothers laughed dryly, like those who have little fear in their throats. I fell asleep. For me, the sky was a tranquil roof.
    In the morning I woke up, bigger now because of the immensity of the sky. Never would I forget that when you live on earth you also live beneath the sky. Even now, man seems not to have been made of the earth under his feet but to have sprung from the sky above his head. It would be impossible for me to see myself in any other way than as a grain of dust lost on the crust of the sky.
    We were dislodged from the sky by the workmen with their planks and nails, their saws and hammers. Downstairs in the kitchen, my father and mother were sitting at the big table. We jostled one another as we shouted, telling of our great adventure. Neither my father nor mother looked up. Their faces were marked with despair. Had they been crying? They didn’t speak or move, they were bent down. On the table a letter lay unfolded.
    â€˜Defraud the government…’ my father moaned.
    â€˜Defraud the government…’ my mother repeated.
    â€˜Defraud,’ said my father again. ‘I never learned how to do that.’
    My father was accused by the government of not paying all the taxes that he owed it. The government was demanding the unpaid balance, under the pain of a fine. My fatherwanted to pay that very morning. For him, a man wasn’t a man if he couldn’t pay cash.
    He thought, too, that a man isn’t a man if he doesn’t put a roof over his children’s heads. Before we were born he went far away, behind the mountains, in search of money that