“But the minute I woke up that Christmas morning, I knew something truly out of the ordinary was about to happen,” Grandfather said, pouring himself yet another glass of eggnog.
On the Christmas morning that he turned seven, Grandfather continued, his mother dressed him up in a new sweater and said, for five minutes straight, how beautiful and handsome he was. She couldn’t stop kissing him, as if it was a curse.
Later in the day, his uncles and aunts, whom he hadn’t seen all year, came toppling through the door, wearing fancy outfits and drinking and being merry. They kissed him all over the face with their boozy, boozy breath. They sang songs and knocked over some plates and broke a couple of cups. Cousin after cousin kept showing up, until there were maybe thirteen cousins in the house.
Then his older brothers started arriving with their girlfriends. The girlfriends laughed and sang and drank too much, trying to show off what a good time they were. Grandfather had never seen such pretty girls as the ones his brothers brought home that Christmas Day, with their red lipstick and perfect curls and fancy party dresses. And they all toasted one another and life while sitting on his lucky brothers’ laps.
Right before they were about to sit down to eat, Grandfather’s oldest brother, Toots, came in dressed in his army uniform. He was going to be shipped off to Europe in two days, and everyone went wild seeing him. They almost never saw Toots anymore because he was always off gallivanting and pursuing some new girl or money-making scheme. He sang a dirty song he’d picked up downtown and he did his famous impersonation of James Cagney.
The table was covered with food. The turkey was so enormous that you couldn’t put your arms around it if you tried. There were mounds of sweet potatoes and cranberries and corn and sweetbreads. And then there was round after round of cakes and cookies. You couldn’t possibly imagine how much his family ate that day. They ate like the big bad wolf in fairy tales, who could swallow whole families.
And the house, which was usually so cold and bleak, was filled with cigarette smoke and laughter and yelling and tears and accusations. And everyone telling the same favourite memories that they would tell every Christmas. And they laughed about jobs they had lost, and girls that had gotten away and pets that were in heaven.
Even though Grandfather sometimes felt left out during the year and like nobody on earth loved him, everyone remembered to bring him something so lovely that Christmas Day. He suddenly felt like a regular Little Lord Fauntleroy, what with all those gifts. He got teddy bears, mittens with snowflakes on them and a little tin fire engine.
That night seemed to last and last and last. No matter what was going to happen, if Toots never came back from the war, which he never did, and some of the girls grew fat and unhappy with his brothers, which they did, they would always have this night when everyone was happy and worry-free.
It seemed like with everything Grandfather recalled, he imagined it bigger and better and stranger than it could actually be. But this Christmas Day, to our surprise, seemed like any Christmas Day in any household. It was as if he couldn’t imagine anything grander than the typical Christmas that people were having. It was magical enough on its own and couldn’t be improved upon. This sort of made my brother and me feel very warm inside.
But then, after his fourth glass of eggnog, Grandfather told us that later in the evening, Toots took off his jacket and his mermaid tattoo started flirting with one of the cousins. At which point Toots threw the cousin right out the window and into the backyard, where, to everyone’s amazement, they discovered a tipsy reindeer with a bright red nose, throwing up.
“Excuse me,” the reindeer said. “I get motion sickness with all this spinning around the world on Christmas night. Not to mention I had a few too many with the elves before leaving the North Pole.”
Then the reindeer staggered up into the sky, skirting past the girls leaping out of windows, and circling around the wayward air balloons whose passengers sat in the baskets, singing Christmas carols.
Then Grandfather’s mother noticed that the reindeer had left behind a package: a little bundle wrapped in fish paper. She opened it and found Jeannie, Grandfather’s youngest sister, who happened to have been born on Christmas Day, curled up and sleeping inside.
“And that,” said Grandfather, “was what Christmas miracles were like before the war!”
THE WOLF-BOY OF NORTHERN QUEBEC
Two years before we met and fell in love, Pierre-Loup was discovered in the north of Quebec, half-naked and covered in filth. It was the newspapers that nicknamed him Pierre-Loup, a name he told me he could never stand. At the time of his discovery, his identity was confirmed as that of Pierre Normand, who had gone missing from a campsite eighteen years earlier. Everyone thought the little Normand boy had long been murdered or had starved to death, but this was not the case. Pierre had been living among the wolves.
Sightings of the legendary wolf-boy had been common in the north of Quebec for years.
“There’s Pierre-Loup,” high school boys would tell their girls, pointing into the woods, and the girls would clutch them tighter. People would occasionally claim to have seen a naked little boy running out of their yards with strangled chickens in his hands, laughing. When he was seven, the wolves found him red rubber boots, a pair of shorts and a brown sweater in a garbage dump. As a clothed little boy, Pierre-Loup was able to venture into parks and supermarkets and steal whole barbecued chickens to bring back to the pack. The wolves had never eaten so well in their lives, and in this way, Pierre and the wolves lived their lives happily, with Pierre becoming a valued member of the pack.
But then at twenty-three, Pierre-Loup was apprehended running out of a supermarket with an armful of raw hamburger meat, as a pack of wolves lay waiting in the parking lot.
“Unhand me, varmints,” cursed Pierre as the wolves scrambled over parked cars on their way back to the woods.
In the hours that followed, the world learned of Pierre-Loup’s history. Sociologists and linguists rushed to meet him in the hotel where he was sequestered, to learn how a feral child could have grown up to speak so well.
Pierre-Loup told them he had learned English by overhearing as he rooted through garbage cans behind people’s houses and reading the labels on beef jerky wrappers.
“I’ve always been a fast learner,” he said. “The only one in our pack who could peel an orange.”
The authorities made an attempt to contact his parents, but as it turned out, the grief over his childhood disappearance had driven them both to despair, and five years earlier, after coming home from an evening out with friends, they had sealed up the windows, laid themselves down in bed and turned on the gas.
And so Pierre-Loup was left without a human soul in the world.
Pierre was unexpectedly charming, not at all what you would expect from a feral child, and people couldn’t get enough of him. He did the talk-show circuit, regaling interviewers with stories about his wolf family.
“I had one cousin who was always trying to pass himself off as some sort of ‘lone wolf,’ but then around mealtime, he’d always creep back, pretending to have forgotten something.”
When asked if he’d always felt like an outsider among the wolves, he sneered, “Why would I? I am a wolf.”
And he did vaguely resemble one. His mouth was huge like Mick Jagger’s and his face almost seemed to split in two when he smiled. Although he was only twenty-three, his messy black hair was going prematurely grey, and from out of it, his huge ears stuck out, accentuating how narrow his face was.