Arvida

  Arvida has never been a town at the crux of history, but rather a place resolutely outside it. There were no thieves in Arvida, at least not many, but there were, drawn by the wealth to be found there or sought out by its laboratories, Americans, Englishmen, and people from the four corners of the earth.

  From Russia came the Marinoffs, one of whose daughters, Sonia, is my godmother.

  From Italy came the machinist Dan Belladonne, Brian Santoni of the employment office, the restaurant owner Amato Verdone, and old man Zampieri, who laid down marble and terrazzo, and who was the grandfather of the Bourque brothers.

  From Poland came Matt Barkovitz, the mechanic Joe Pollock, and my grandparents’ neighbour, Mister Belinak.

  From Holland had come the chemist Neil Van Dalen.

  From Greece came Gus Tectonidis, and the friend of the family Vic Kostopoulos.

  From Japan came Frank Watanabe, the engineer. It appears he was not alone: a photo from between the wars shows the former factory pay office, a shed that looked like a train station out of an old Western, with in front of it, swaying in the breeze and suspended from two chains, a sign with the words PAY OFFICE written in French, English, and in Japanese characters.

  From Catalonia came Jordi Bonet, just long enough to create a large mural on the front of the city hall.

  From the pasturelands of Ireland and the heaths of Scotland came, try to sort them out: the other Archibald family, the Burrows, Terry Loucks, Neil Balcon, Reidy Smith of the Arvida orchestra, the Duffys, the O’Dorthys and the Fountains, Teddy Hallahan, Stephen Lee (Peter Lee’s father), the expert carpenter Médéric McLaughlin, father of Popeye McLaughlin and fourteen other children who looked as alike as two drops of water.

  I’ve forgotten some, obviously. All these people had come to Arvida, drawn to a Nordic version of El Dorado, an American Dream that had veered some thousands of kilometres off course. They’d often come to forget things, and never, never ever, to remember anything. Certainly not a war.

  Another paternal story of larceny illustrates this principle in catastrophic fashion. My grandfather, a foreman in the painting workshop, was responsible for purchases, and sometimes received a visit from Mister Addams, who dealt in products to be used in industrial renovation. Mister Addams was a tall, strapping Welshman, blond and blue-eyed, good looking but with equine teeth. He’d arrive with an armful of alcohol, cheap gin especially, and ate with the family and the Polish neighbour Mister Belinak, who always found a way to get himself invited.

  After dinner the children were sent right to bed and my grandmother was thanked for her help, free, for once, to relax in the basement in front of the television set. My grandfather, Mister Addams, and Mister Belinak talked together late into the night, until their stock of hard liquor was totally depleted. For my father, still very young, those evenings were shrouded in a certain mystery. It never entered his mind that they were hidden from his eyes only to spare him the shocking spectacle of seeing his father drunk.

  Georges-Émile Archibald didn’t drink, except for a porter thick as molasses at Saturday breakfast to go with his eggs and mustard, and, in hiding, in the garage. In the unbridled imagination of my father, these meetings assumed the proportion of Yalta conferences in miniature. The men were clearly making important decisions, either in sharing out the free world or for the better good of those living on Rues Moisan, Castner, and Foucault.

  Once, at the hour when the oldsters ought to be retiring to read in bed and the youngsters heading to sleep, my father, without anyone noticing, slipped into the sideboard next to the dining room table, installed himself like a contortionist, and closed himself in. His plan having succeeded, he waited patiently for the evening to reveal its secrets.

  In vain.

  Made bold by drink, my grandfather, Mister Belinak, and Mister Addams had no more to exchange than dirty jokes, which might have interested my father were he two or three years older. For the time being he understood nothing at all.

  The men talked in a kind of drunken Esperanto composed of mispronounced fragments of each other’s language, belches, and slaps on the back. My father fell asleep, not knowing that the latch on the door he’d closed was holding him prisoner. It was apparently a good latch, which stood in the way of a logical course of events. Under normal circumstances, my father, his weight bearing forward as he lapsed into sleep, would have forced open the door and fallen to the floor with a thump in front of the guests. Instead, the latch held true, and it was the entire dish-laden cabinet high on its legs that my father dragged with him in his descent. It crashed down on the table, exploding in all directions in splinters of wood and broken glass, almost killing Mister Belinak by fracturing his skull or giving him a heart attack. The men, who had jumped up in unison, stood there dazed for several seconds, before hearing a child weeping beneath the debris.

  Usually the story ended there. But on one occasion my father thought good to add this addendum.

  We were in the woods, just the two of us, and he said:

  “Welsh, my ass. Addams, his real name was Himmler or Goebbels. And Mister Belinak liked him even if he’d killed all his brothers and sisters.”

  *

  The revelation was doubtless apocryphal and a bit forced, but it said what there was to say about our town, that it was a place of refuge where almost everything could be wiped away and forgotten.

  Arvida was a town for second chances, undue hopes, and also games.

  My grandparents themselves had landed up there in part to hide from their families a shameful secret. My grandfather was a pious man who hadn’t sworn twice in his life. He said his rosary at night like an old woman knits. He was a miracle-worker his friends and family phoned from all over, because his prayers stopped bleeding, cured migraines, and helped find lost objects.

  The Lord was his shepherd, but my grandfather wasn’t made of wood. By subtracting the date of my uncle Clinton’s birth from the date of his marriage in the church of Sainte-Thérese, you got something like four months and a bit. My grandmother married pregnant, and my grandparents fled Beauport to expunge the original sin.

  As my father said:

  “Your grandfather didn’t want anyone to know that there was a bit of Rasputin in our saintly Brother André.”

  *

  My grandfather was also a great athlete, and that’s what got him invited to Arvida.

  It was before colour television and the big networks, Hockey Night and all the tralala, at a time when people had to get their entertainment locally. People in Arvida were mad for sports, outdoor or indoor. They played baseball and softball in the summer. They skated in winter. And all year long you could bowl, see hockey games, or watch wrestling matches at the Community Centre. In the park in front of the big sports complex, you could walk around or sit on a bench in front of a big grandstand where bands and orchestras played.

  My grandfather was taken on by Monsieur Latraverse, who was the foreman in Alcan’s painting shop, and also a hockey coach. For two years he played hockey all winter and softball all summer, before being hired as an industrial painter in the factory. From then on, my family’s destiny was closely bound to this town of leisure and forgetfulness, where anyone could become a saint after having sinned, and where you could achieve local fame as an athlete while waiting for someone to give you a real job.

  For a long time, everything went well.

  Clinton was born on September 3, 1947.

  Hélène on October 20, 1949.

  Lise on March 11, 1951.

  Douglas, my father, on November 17, 1954.

  Georges on May 12, 1956.

  Terry, my godfather, on May 25, 1962.

  All were good children, and were raised to attend Mass twice a day out of respect for one canonical trinity, and another made up of God, the Montreal Canadiens, and the New York Yankees.

  The family flourished in
pace with the town, the children grew older, and when they were of an age, the three oldest went off to university.

  Signs of exhaustion then began to manifest themselves.

  At the age of thirty-nine, my grandmother fell victim to an inexplicable glaucoma and had to be operated on several times so as not to become blind. The operations weakened her considerably, and became more and more delicate, even life-threatening. For weeks, the wives of the bosses and workers delivered food to the terrified husband and children.

  During the summer of love, in 1967, my uncle Georges, twelve years old, lost a tooth during the night. Instead of swallowing it, as happens in most such cases, he breathed in the tooth, which rattled around dangerously inside his lungs. He nearly died, and when he recovered, it was to learn that his kidneys were in very bad shape.

  It was said that my grandfather never got over that.

  My uncle Georges was the quintessence of the Archibald family. He was as bright and studious as the girls, as good a communicator as Clinton, and as brainy, when he applied himself, as Terry, the youngest. He had my father’s gift of the gab, and even surpassed him in sports.3

  It’s always a bad omen for a family to see fate bear down on its most illustrious member. The wind was shifting, it’s clear, but no one saw it. When he left the hospital, Georges shut himself up in his room and had himself brought down in his armchair to go and pass, hands down, the Ministry exams, making up in a few months all he’d missed over almost two years. He then went back to his room for five months, and to prove the doctors wrong who’d said that he’d never walk again, he came downstairs under his own steam at Christmas and celebrated New Year’s on his feet. In many ways, he’d come to embody the Archibald family’s resilience.

  And so even if the curse was upon them, my grandparents thought that everything would work out. Georges was getting better. Their older children began to have children of their own. Not even twenty-five years old, my father, the most typical Arvidian of the lot, was making money hand over fist with his Bojeans boutiques and his wagers on golf. He owned about half of the hockey and baseball teams in town. Twice a week he went up to Quebec City with Georges for his dialysis. He left him at the Laval University hospital, headed for Montreal to pick up jeans from his warehouses, then returned to the Saguenay, picking up Georges on the way. To entertain us, he brought back from the Parc des Laurentides terrifying stories of hitchhikers glimpsed in the wan morning hours, or of strange lights in the sky.

  *

  It’s important to underline: this town whose years of glory I celebrate, I myself only knew it in decline, along with the decline of my own family.

  In 1978, the year of my birth, Arvida was administratively fused with Jonquière. On the ground everything looked the same, but its status had changed.

  Arvida, a town unto itself, and a model city, no longer existed.

  The same year saw both the town’s apotheosis and its swan song, a brief burst of brightness at a time when its future was already darkening.

  Pierre-Paul Parent, alias Pitou, my father’s henchman and my uncle, so to speak, along with the O’Keefe representative Roland Hébert, organized a hockey match that would pitch former Montreal Canadiens against the stars of Arvida’s commercial league. Pitou owned the Station, a fashionable bar at the time, which occupied a handsome building on the Rue de Neuville that had once been the Arvida railway station, and today is a funeral home.

  In the opposing ranks were Jean-Guy Talbot, Henri Richard, Claude Provost, Gilles Marotte, Ken Mosdell, and many others. In the nets, I believe, was the former Rangers goalie Gilles Villemure. The coach and manager of the team, who during the exhibition games served as referee, was Maurice Richard, the Rocket. Pitou appointed himself scorekeeper and house announcer.

  The Arvida players were no pushovers. All had played at least to the Junior level, including my father, who wasn’t playing at that point because he’d hurt his knee and my mother was pregnant, but the family legend was that he’d had his nose broken by Guy Lafleur at the Remparts camp a few years earlier.

  Among them, Yvon Bouchard had played in Europe, and Mauril Morisette and Réjean Maltais in the American League, while Germain Gagnon had made the Islanders camp in New York. All represented the fragile memory of a time when the balance of power wasn’t yet predetermined, when the far corners of the countryside produced humble athletes as good, if not better, than those in the urban centres.

  An important page in regional history was written, in fact, when in February 1910, the Canadiens hockey team came to contest an exhibition game against the Chicoutimi Hockey Club. The Canadiens, led by the marksmen Didier Pitre and Newsy Lalonde, were unable to score a single goal against the legendary Georges Vezina. They lost 11-0, and left, their tails between their legs, but with an important consolation prize: Vezina himself, who tended their nets for sixteen seasons, only to die, just like that, from a coughing fit, before having blown out even forty birthday candles.

  Of course, no one was going to abscond with a major league club after the match at the Community Centre. The dreams of glory had had their day, and the former Canadiens, in any case, hadn’t even arrived by bus. They’d come down in a cavalcade, four by four in big Buicks, Molsons tucked between their legs. That was no reason to knuckle under, certainly. And it was no accident that the Arvidian who led the assault was himself a goalie, and doubtless the player who’d come closest to a career in the National Hockey League. Claude Hardy had played in the AHL for the Springfield Kings and the Rochester Americans, had played several games in the NHL, but had decided to swap his dreams of glory for the love of a woman and a job as fireman that his father and a priest had found for him.

  He still loved his wife and the job, but he missed the glory. From the start of the match, before three thousand people at the Community Centre, Hardy adopted a super-aggressive style verging on mental imbalance, akin to that of Gerry Cheevers, or the approach popularized later by Ron Hextall. He shot out of his goal like a wild man, skated far from the neutral zone to renew the attack, and aimed great hatchet blows with his stick at anyone coming too close to his net.

  Above all he played goal. The shots that the former Canadiens in vacation mode lobbed in his direction ended up in his mitt, under his pads, diverted into the stands, everywhere but in the net.

  At the end of the first period, the score was 3-0 for Arvida. Hardy seemed to have lit a fire under his teammates, one that had long been dormant. The crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, was jubilant, and the Canadiens seemed not to know what had hit them. They’d come to have fun and be served a free meal. Most were playing bare-headed with their locks smoothed back to charm the local beauties, and perhaps to entice one of them into their room at the Richelieu Motel. Now their hair was a mess and they were bleeding from the nose.

  They didn’t like that, nor did the Rocket and nor did Pitou, who hadn’t struggled to entice these sports legends to Arvida just to have them beat up on. He tore a strip off the players in the locker room during the first break, reminding them that they wanted to fill the arena and his bar afterwards, that they wanted a great party and money to finance the league, not a bloody Saint Valentine’s massacre.

  He ended by saying:

  “Come on. These guys are our heroes.”

  And that’s when Hardy, sitting bent over, staring at a point on the ground between his pads, super concentrated, raised his eyes to Pitou and replied:

  “Heroes my ass.”4

  No one added a word, and Pitou left the room, cursing.

  The second period was more difficult for the Arvida stars, who bled from the nose in their turn. The Habs had woken up, and the Rocket, as referee, showed himself to be very parsimonious with his whistle when his former teammates pounded the locals into the boards. Pitou himself, as scorekeeper, played free and easy with the time, favouring the legends, terminating their penalties with undue alacrity, and
dragging out those imposed on his obstinate fellow Arvidians.

  And yet the Arvidians held their ground. Hardy especially. He gave up three goals, but stopped an improbable number of hard shots, while driving the crowd wild. He raised his arms in the air and saluted them. When the action shifted to the other end, he pulled a comb out of his mitt and adjusted the part on the side of his head, like a little punk. The spectators howled with laughter. Towards the fifteenth minute of the second period, Henri Richard got a breakaway while Hardy was doing his little stunt. Hardy let Richard come at him without putting his helmet back on, his head held high like that of an ancient warrior. Richard waited until he was just the right distance away, and unleashed a vicious slap shot that Hardy grabbed a nanosecond later, sweeping his arm around in a wide arc. The puck slammed into his mitt with a hollow plop, like a burst of buckshot into a pillow.

  That’s when Hardy committed the most Saguenayan act I’ve ever seen in my life. Courageous, grand, arrogant, and in the end utterly stupid. Before the referee could even blow his whistle, Hardy dropped the puck and slid it towards Richard, as if to say, “Here, have another go.” It took Henri Richard two or three seconds to grasp the significance of the gesture, after which he charged Hardy, letting his gloves fall to the ice. The brawl became general, and while the crowd noisily voiced its elation, Maurice Richard, the rocket, skated to the scorer’s box near the penalty bench, and said to Pitou:

  “Hey. We’re not here to be laughed at.”

  The Habs added another goal after the fight, and the teams went back to their locker rooms with the score 5-4 for the locals. Pitou apologized to Maurice, and, confident, went to join the players. He had a plan.

  The substitute goalie for the Arvida stars was Rémy Bouchard, caretaker for the high school, and tavern keeper. For him it was an honorary position, because he’d done a lot for the league and the team. He was a good-humoured fellow, liked by all. It was said that he could drink a twelve-pack in less than forty-five minutes, and that he kept his goalie equipment all year long in the back of his pickup, so that it smelled of mould and cat piss. In his entire life, however, he’d never stopped anything, neither a puck nor a beach ball.