by Deni Béchard
“You’re not going to come see me, are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him too quickly, instantly wishing I’d taken the time to consider. “Not right now.”
“I know. What you’re doing is right. I’m glad you’re strong. I’ve ruined my life, and you should . . . you should focus on yours. But you’ll be okay?”
“Okay?” I repeated.
“Are you sure you can deal with it?”
I didn’t speak, and as we listened to the breaking static, I thought of what I could tell him, what emotion I could give voice to that wasn’t strength.
“Will you be okay?” he asked.
“It’s . . . it’s your choice. I can’t ask you not to.”
“You can deal with it?”
“Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
“It’s what’s best,” he said.
Sleet pattered across the panels, making his voice distant. I shivered, realizing how cold I was.
“When I’m dead,” he told me, “you can contact my family. My mother’s name is Yvonne. I’m sure she’s still alive. I’d know if she was dead.” He was quiet a long time. “She lives in a place called Matane, in Quebec.”
“Matane,” I repeated.
“Promise me you won’t try to find her while I’m still alive.”
“I promise.”
“If you contact her, tell her you’re Edwin’s son.”
“Edwin?”
“That’s what they called me. She’s the one I miss. I wish I could see her one more time. I lied to her a lot, and then I stopped writing. I used to send her postcards saying I was in Mexico or on my way to Alaska. One time, when I was logging, I saw a guy get crushed under a tree. He cried and called for his mother. I didn’t understand.”
Neither of us spoke, and I tried to think of what I could say, how I could talk to him differently, in a way that would change all this.
“There was a time,” he said, “when I could’ve gone back, when you guys were little. But it’s too late now. How would I explain everything? I have nothing to show.”
I stared through the dirty glass of the phone booth, at the smear of headlights above the road. Something fell in the static behind his voice.
“Listen, I should go. I should go,” he said. “It’s late. You should get some sleep.”
He said good-bye and hung up before I could speak.
I got in my truck and pulled onto the road, taking my time going up the mountain, rain gusting past the headlights. My mind was silent. I turned into my driveway and parked and went inside to my apartment.
I sat and touched my face to my hands, my elbows to my knees, and breathed.
EPILOGUE
That spring a public accountant in Vancouver called to explain that my father had owed tens of thousands in back taxes and the government would confiscate and auction what they could, which wasn’t much—two wristwatches. A month later I received the rest, a small box of photographs with Air Mail, Par Avion stickers on it, the customs slip stating No Value. Inside were pictures held by blue rubber bands: photographs of our family and of himself. These were all he had while he sat in the single chair in his house, telling me his stories.
My favorites were those of him, the flash of superiority in his dark eyes, his bold stance before the camera. One showed him young, leaning on the tailgate of an old pickup, heel cocked against the hitch, his lean brown body taut as he laughed. Another had him holding a baby. His arms bulged and the baby cried. Behind him, a German shepherd looked out the window, its dark nose invisible against the black glass. And then, years later, he posed before a decorated Christmas tree, his beard shaved to a mustache, his face lined. He wore a gray sports jacket and a white shirt. His jaw was lifted, with an expression of Old World pride, a look that said to the photographer, This is the shot you want.
That year and the next, silence hummed within me. I burned my old writing, all except the notes from our conversations. I wanted stillness, lightness—as if by losing everything, I could, if only briefly, feel complete. I wrote and studied, trying to compose him in a novel. In my need to write, I recognized his longing to speak—the urgency of his telling, to make us understand each other and bring us to a place of forgiveness. I wanted to know what in him had been capable of leading his life, just as he’d been trying to understand the life he’d lived, and the simpler one he’d wanted but been incapable of. The more I wrote, the more I became clear, my words, my way of telling a story, the further he receded. He eluded me—the landscape of his youth, the people who’d helped create him.
Gradually, after two and a half years, the silence subsided. I began to read in French often and dreamed in it as I had years before. Memories returned, forgotten emotions in the sounds, the language and culture I’d taken for granted. I’d say foulard and within the word was a flash of cold and the bliss of a parent who knelt to tie my scarf and fit it into my jacket. It didn’t seem like him, but as I read, the sound of words remembered for me: my grammar book with the ducks on the cover, the exercises we repeated: je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes.
I wrote the letter, saying that I was the son of Edwin, the name a stranger to my pen:
Chère Yvonne,
Je sais que vous ne me connaissez pas et que le contenu de cette lettre va être surprenant et même parfois difficile à lire . . .
A week later, a man called, his gravelly voice so familiar that I had a moment of confusion, the impression of dreaming, of a night conversation from two years before. He told me that he was my uncle, and we spoke about my father and the family, their happiness that I’d written, the questions they had. When I explained how my father died, he asked that I not share this with my grandmother. She was past ninety and, though strong, deeply religious; the news would be devastating. I agreed to say he’d died of cancer.
I set out for Quebec, driving through Maine and into New Brunswick, then north toward the Saint Lawrence, into a rolling landscape of weathered stone. Late August showers blew through, dark patches in an otherwise clear sky. The landscape revealed little about its inhabitants: scant villages, Lac-des-Aigles or Saint-Esprit, hardly more than a gas station, convenience store, and a few houses lining the road. The land climbed until the horizon dropped and far below, the Saint Lawrence extended like a plain of stone.
The fear I’d been harboring—that I’d discover a family of thugs—was quickly dispelled. I met my uncle first, the youngest sibling. He’d been a boy when my father left. He was my height, well dressed, wearing glasses, his eyes and hair dark, hints of my father in his jaw, though otherwise a very different man, as I would learn—gentler, kinder. He was a successful businessman and introduced me to the family. From time to time, he paused to say how happy he was, that they’d never known what happened to my father.
“On est bien content que tu nous as écrit. On n’avait pas de nouvelles d’Edwin.”
My grandmother was ninety and lived in her own apartment. When I entered the room, her gaze didn’t leave me, searching my face even as she stepped quickly past the others. Her green eyes focused through her glasses. She gripped my arm and studied me.
“Mon dieu, mon dieu,” she uttered and said I looked like my father—“comme il a l’air d’Edwin.”
The next four days were visit upon visit, conversations that lasted into the morning, tears and questions. The family hadn’t seen him since 1967, exactly thirty years, and the last time he’d called was around 1973. They remembered him saying that my brother had been born. A large framed photo of my father had stood on my grandmother’s television for decades.
I asked her what he was like as a child, and she gave this some thought.
“He didn’t cry,” she said, “and he was the only one who didn’t sing when he worked.”
My father’s older sister showed me other photographs, the stark cabin on a barren stretch of northern coast where he was born, the shot from the water, past immense stones. And at last there were pictures from when he’d retur
ned home, a dapper young man, his jacket pulled back at the side, hand on his hip, like a land baron posing for a portrait.
Seeing pictures of the family and clapboard house, I struggled to connect this world to the man I’d known. My grandfather Alphonse had died years before, and my father’s brother Bernard as well, but no one said much about him. There were the stories I already knew about how Alphonse had made my father and Bernard box in the living room.
“They were hard men—your grandfather, and Edwin and Bernard,” my uncle’s wife told me. She suggested that I ask my uncle about Expo 67, my father’s last visit. “It disturbed him,” she said. “He doesn’t like to speak of it.”
After dinner I did ask, when my uncle and I were alone. He drank his beer and gave this some thought.
“I saw them start a fight. Edwin and Bernard. Not with each other, but with everyone else in the bar. It really shocked me. They’d taken me to the expo. I was dressed in my best clothes and was wearing a tie. A man accidentally spilled his drink on Edwin’s arm. I just sat there. I couldn’t move. I’ve never seen violence like that. Edwin started it, and Bernard joined him. They hit anyone who got in their way. They broke everything. They . . . they destroyed people.”
He appeared to consider this.
“You know, your father used to call me. I was pretty young then. He said he’d been in prison because he accidentally killed a man. He said he punched him and the man fell and hit his head on the edge of the sidewalk. He wasn’t old enough to go to prison so he was sent to a detention center in the prairies. He told me it was boring.”
Though I didn’t say it, I wondered if this story had been my father’s way of justifying his absence, of making his years in prison sound accidental. It may also simply have been one of the many things for which he’d been incarcerated.
We sat quietly at the table, the rest of the family watching TV in the living room.
“How did Bernard die?” I asked.
He looked at me, his eyes impassive behind the steel frames of his glasses, as if to see who I was required not close study but simple patience.
“Il s’est suicidé aussi,” he said finally. “That’s why we can’t tell your grandmother the truth about your father. For her to know that another of her sons took his own life would be too much. She drove everyone crazy trying to get Bernard’s ashes into the cemetery.”
The next day, I had lunch with my aunt, and she told me about my father’s last visit. We sat in the dining room, the afternoon cool and blustery through the open windows.
“He was driving a convertible and had on silk clothes and brought presents for everyone. Each time we talked, he laughed and said nothing was stopping him. He was going straight up. But he and your grandfather got into an argument. They’d gone for a drive in Edwin’s new convertible. When they came back, your grandfather got out and spit on the floorboards. Edwin was furious. No one knew what had happened. Edwin had been his favorite. He’d been everyone’s favorite. He was the one who decided he hated us. Not us. We loved him. We always wanted him to come back.”
Maybe my father blamed my grandfather for their poverty, their entire way of life. I tried to understand how my grandfather’s violence could have shaped his sons. She explained the rivalry between the brothers, Edwin and Bernard, their eagerness to better the other, to win their father’s admiration.
“Bernard,” she said, “used to tell us that he was lucky he’d learned to fight. Ton grandpère would put gloves on Edwin and Bernard, and the family watched as they fought. Bernard was a lot bigger even though he was two years younger, but Edwin was fast. Il était malin et orgueilleux—clever and proud. He always found a way to win.”
“What about Bernard? Tell me about his death.”
She hesitated. “He was a difficult man. He drank too much and was aggressive. He didn’t have your father’s charm. Edwin was easy to like, and that must have been hard for Bernard.”
She explained how between voyages as a merchant marine Bernard would occasionally show up at her door, drunk and wanting to talk.
“Once,” she said, “he told me he’d seen your father. He said he’d found him in prison. I didn’t believe him. He said Edwin was in a prison in Tacoma . . . Y était en prison, he said. Chus allé aux States et je l’ai trouvé.”
She’d not have believed anyone else, but Bernard, Edwin, and Alphonse were different. “There were men in the family like that, who could go anywhere, do anything.”
He’d described to her how he found him and told him that everyone would know he was a criminal—that he’d go back and tell Maman. She’d asked how long ago this was. Plus de cinq ans, he told her. More than five years.
My father had claimed he never had a single visit in prison. Why hadn’t he mentioned this meeting with Bernard, one brother having found the other in a world of impossibility? Were there kind words between them, and did old resentments come up later? Or did Bernard arrive wanting to punish my father for his last, splendid visit home, the way he lavished the family with gifts as the others never could have done?
Tout le monde va savoir, he’d told him. They’re all going to know.
What could my father have done behind the wire mesh and Plexiglas? How did they say good-bye? And when he returned to his cell, he must have believed he could never go home.
But Bernard then told my aunt another story, a stranger one, more recent, from that year. He’d docked in Vancouver and gone to a popular market near the downtown, called Granville. He’d seen Edwin behind the counter in a fish store. Edwin had a large beard and pretended not to know Bernard. He claimed he didn’t speak French. My aunt described perfectly, as Bernard had described to her, Granville Island Market and my father’s shop there, even my father, with his beard, as he’d appeared those years.
But Bernard never told their mother any of what he knew. When he spoke to my aunt, it was with anger but also pity. He hadn’t told the family as he’d threatened.
“It made sense,” she said, “why your father called a few times. He must have been trying to find out what we knew. He told me that things were difficult, that he didn’t have much money. Normally, the family would have offered to help. He wouldn’t have needed to ask. That’s how we were. But we’d seen him so rich we couldn’t imagine him poor. And he was too proud to ask . . . Only now that I’ve seen the photos of your childhood, I understand how poor you were. We would have helped. He should have asked.”
I recalled our years in the valley, how he started businesses and worked constantly to build a life. His effort had hidden the bitterness of loss, the intention that whatever Bernard told the family would no longer matter. Was it possible that he’d gone against his nature and built that life, one so close in so many ways to his own childhood, only to prove his brother wrong?
As for Bernard, he told only my aunt. Shortly after that conversation, he called from Montreal and she answered. He asked to speak to his mother, who was at the table for dinner. He told her that he loved her and shot himself in the heart.
What had my father thought, seeing Bernard across the counter in Granville? The year our father opened the shop would have been the same that Bernard died. Maybe he believed that some things could never be fixed. Or he couldn’t undo what he’d resolved through pride and strength: to disappear rather than let his family see his failure. But though Bernard was the one person who knew of his crimes, he no doubt also loved him as the rest of the family did, this his older brother, after all. Perhaps he wanted to say he’d never made true on his threat.
Even now I try to grasp this, the two suicides acted out in each other’s absence, in the ignorance of the other’s solitude and pain—two brothers walking past each other like strangers.
Nights, unable to sleep, I rewrote drafts of my father’s story. I struggled to give it a shape that made sense, to see other versions of his life, to resolve questions that he’d left unanswered.
Gradually, I realized there were too many fabrications, too muc
h fantasy. I found myself peeling back the fictions. I craved to see the characters clearly and wondered how much of what I was writing was true—not just my embellishments, but his own exaggerations and those of his family. There was so much chronology I could never iron out, so many jumbled facts. He often told his stories slightly differently, depending on his mood, on whatever truth he sought in his past at that moment. From my family, I learned the word agrémenteur, slang for “storyteller,” a play on words: agrémenter, “to embellish,” and menteur, “liar.” I wasn’t as interested in the facts behind his stories, the prisons themselves, or the police records. The memories of fictions and fantasies are as real as memories of any other experience. But still, there was so much I wished I could ask him. I tried to recall his voice through the phone, his silences so intense that I could hear each leaf’s rustling fall to the frostbitten ferns outside the window.
One afternoon, my uncle and I drove along the windy coast to the southwestern edge of Gaspésie. We stopped at the old farmstead where my father had grown up, where my grandfather had been raised. A rutted dirt track rose from the main road, the overgrown land making a steep ascent to higher fields. Far below were what my uncle called les islets, a few weathered ridges just out from the shore, where my grandfather and his father before him had fished. My aunt had shown me the place in old photos, nets pulled up from the channel, the scattered fish a bright shade of gray among the rocks.
We walked from the farmstead, where nothing—not a sign of house or foundation or barn—remained, to the stones of an old seawall against which the steady gulf wind broke.
We drove to the nearby village of Les Méchins: ramshackle houses in a few lanes next to the stone church that had been the focus of many stories, where Curé Jean, the priest he’d hated, had preached. He died during my father’s last visit, in 1967, a topic of some speculation.