“Well mother of Christ, they got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”
Another excerpt from their storybook romance that Sylvie never cared to talk about. It wasn’t the insult to her language and people, mind you, but the cavalier name-in-vain-taking of Our Holy Mother. Sylvie was about a hundred times more Catholic than Gord. It was all about Notre Dame in Sylvie’s neck of the wood, so my old man’s offhand blasphemy — as natural to Gord as scratching his nuts — came very close to losing him the ball game.
Not close enough, unfortunately for every last one of us. If the gods were keeping a pie-plate eye that day, they decided to let the ants go marching blindly forward.
Sylvie was wearing hip waders for the occasion, standing with a fishing pole up to her knees in the Firesteel River as my dad came sloshing over, heedless of soaking his pants, more than a little sloshed himself.
“They biting?” he hollered, slipping on a rock as he approached and having to steady himself against her.
Sylvie frowned as she teetered, bracing her stomach muscles. Not yet annoyed, as she tells it, only perplexed. She didn’t understand how any self-respecting young man from a no-doubt rural, fishing-and-hunting background similar to her own could come sloshing through the river toward her, hollering greetings, and then exhibit, peacocklike, the sheer, splendored idiocy to ask, “Are they biting?”
“No,” replied Sylvie. “Dey aren’t biting.”
Gord, as unperceptive as he’d already proven himself to be, didn’t miss a beat when he caught wind of the accent.
“Well mother of Christ,” he remarked. “They got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?”
How is it my life unfurls from a seed as insignificant and stupid as this, Adam? And what kills me is, it isn’t even my seed. I was adopted, for the love of god. It’s not my life; they weren’t my parents. Somewhere, perhaps at precisely the same moment, two giants came together. You know how that happens — the tall girl no one will ask to dance. Until a man even taller comes along, surveys the room with scorn, like Check it out, short-ass losers. And together, they take the floor. She inclines her endless neck up at him, at last, in gratitude.
Or, I don’t know. All I know are here are these two tiny little people standing in a river in Northern Ontario as the gods keep watch, or don’t. A drunken east coast stereotype insults a fine-boned French girl of slender means. Problem is, they have both nothing and everything in common. They are hicks. They are broke. They are working at the building site of a hydro electrical generating station for isolation pay at White Dog Falls because the world has nothing else to offer them as yet. It is 1965 and kids their age are rioting in the cities, upending the socio-sexual landscape, but my soon-to-be parents are farm people, terrified of cities, of drugs, of the irreligious, of those who walk around wearing entirely different coloured skin from them. The world is changing, rapidly, dizzyingly, and change is something they’ve both been raised to fear. They have this in common: they want no part of it.
And that’s the only explanation I come up with when the question comes to mind, as it so frequently has throughout my life. You know the question: Why did she marry the prick? We all know why she stayed with him: Notre Dame. The abiding influence of Mother Church and her sacred bellyful of domineering fathers. Our Lady of the Sit There and Take It. But why marry Gord in the first place? The world had nothing else to offer, maybe — nothing so comfy and familiar as some freckled knee-jerk French-hater telling her she’s useless.
Sylvie had this terrible story she used to tell about her time up North. That is, she didn’t think it was so terrible — to her it was just a footnote to one of the handful of heroic-outdoorswoman narratives that she cultivated pre-Gord. She was proud of those days, because she was one of the only women working up at the hydro electrical sites when they were being built — these places were nothing but backhoes and Quonset huts, not to mention about fifty men for every woman. She would talk about day-long trips by freighter canoe to Moose Factory, about choking back the contents of her stomach during convulsive, vertiginous flights along the Abitibi River