Grandpère (2 page)

“The next day my uncles and their families went back to their own lodgings, and our village dispersed to our summer camps. Our family went one day’s journey west to the berry grounds and started picking strawberries to dry for the winter. We were there for less than a week when my sister started sweating and became very hot to touch. She never got better, and after a couple of days, she broke out all over with red spots. No one knew what to do. We bathed her with cool water and tried to get her to eat, but she lost her connection with everything around her. One morning she did not rise. By the time she died, my mother, my father and both the little ones were fevered. I was the only one who did not get sick. Within two months our entire family had died. I took my father last to the woods and tried to understand the meaning of this. Our family had rarely been sick, but now they were all gone.”

Grandpère pauses for quite a while here, and I scramble to keep my notes up with the story. I know I’ll have to start typing it; no one but me could make sense of this scribble. Tears are leaking out of my eyes. We look at each other; Grandpère’s eyes have matching tears. He continues on in a shaking voice.

“That summer went by in a haze. Even now, after all these years, I barely remember how a young boy put his family one by one into their resting grounds and tried to make sense out of his life. At summer’s end, I decided to go to the Fort. I didn’t know how to live all by myself, and my uncles’ lodgings were bare and silent. No one came home to the village. All I could think of was to go to the Fort.

“I will tell you about life in that town next time, Grandaughter.”

It’s the first time in all these years he’s told of his family. I look at him in astonishment, tears wet on my face. “How old were you then?” I ask.

He looks up. “Maybe fourteen winters. In my family I was already regarded as a man. Men grew up quicker in those days. That is one of the things I am looking forward to on the other side, seeing them all once again.” His voice grows wistful. “After all this time, will they still know it’s me?”

“Of course,” I say. “You are you, and no one could mistake you.” We laugh, and we both wipe our faces with our sleeves. That makes us laugh more. My grandpère is a tease and a practical joker, and his sense of humour has never changed.

We have dinner and then sit on the porch in the late evening sun. Grandpère is such good company for me, I think, as I knit a sweater for my baby grandson. I was so lonely for so long after my husband died. Lorne and I were married for forty-two years, and the heart attack that killed him was as unexpected as it was final. The first few weeks and months after he passed away were filled with family and friends, but gradually they stopped dropping by so often, reassured that I was “Doing great!” and “Recovering well.” I wanted them to stop feeling pity for me, because I cannot bear pity.

I think back and remember those long, empty days. I planted the garden, tended the animals and bartered my tractor driving in haying season for winter hay for the two horses and my milk cow. The milk cow dried up, and I had the neighbour butcher her. Now even the horses are gone. One was my old saddle horse who lived till he was forty years old, and one was the colt meant to replace him, never broke to ride till he was middle-aged, and me still calling him the colt. I hear he’s a roping horse now, and my nephew is winning money riding him. Good for him. But dogs and other animals do not fill the lonely place inside us that longs for human company, and when Grandpère’s second wife died the following year, I was quick to offer him a place to live in my home.

We rock and make small talk till the sun touches the horizon, and then we make our way to our beds for the night. Grandpère tells me to let him get a head start, since I have a habit of turning out the lights before he gets settled. For such an old man he does well. He is fiercely independent, and the only time we butt heads is when I get too “mother henny,” as he calls it.

The next morning is another warm, sunny day, and he is up sitting at the breakfast table when I get in from letting the chickens out and opening the greenhouse windows. The cucumbers, peppers, zucchini and tomatoes are all starting to bear, and I have my shirt held up like a basket filled with the makings of an omelette.

He is impressed with the things I grow to feed us. I am Métis. Our ancestors taught us to be self-sufficient, and I am proud to say if the trucks stopped coming tomorrow, we would not starve, just eat a little more plainly.

“Good morning.” He nods at the vegetables, stretches his nose out with a little snap, then winks and smiles. It’s a language without words, like when my big dogs sniff their appreciation of the supper smells.

Grandpère says, “I had a dream last night. I was really awake, but it was not here and now, so I know it was a dream. I was in a hotel, and I couldn’t find my room. I kept thinking I had found my room, but every time, strangers that I almost knew came in, and I knew I was in the wrong room. They were so familiar, but I couldn’t quite put a name to them.” He stops briefly and shakes his head, looking puzzled. “After many wrong tries, I found a teacher. He took me to a room with a round table, and all the people whose rooms I had been in came in too. He asked us if we knew who we were, and I suddenly realized that they were all me. Then everyone disappeared except one young woman who was annoyed with me for still being in her room.

“I said to her, ‘Do you see? We’re all in each others’ dreams.’ “‘I am awake and at work and I am not dreaming,’ she said, and then she disappeared too.

“What can that mean?” he asks.

I believe that dreams have their own reality and meaning, so I give this query some consideration but all that comes to mind is the phrase from, I think, the Bible. “My father’s mansion has many rooms,” I say to him.

He tips his head as though he’s caught some meaning from this, and we are silent till we’re done eating. He tells me that he wants to walk to the old sawmill landing this morning. The landing is about a quarter mile from the house. Lorne had a small sawmill set up there when we were developing the property and building the house. Now it’s just an opening in the woods. There’s still a big pile of sawdust on one side and a mountain of slabs on the opposite side. There’s a good trail to it, and it’s a delightful walk, so off he goes, and I feel free to do whatever I want. I type my notes, trying to put in the right punctuation and perk up my rusty typing skills.

By noon I’m up to where he left off, and I’m not having to look at the keys anymore. I type directly into the computer. How I love to use backspace and delete and move sentences around! This is surely one of the good things of this age. Computers and hot running water; easy to come up with two good things.

We have sandwiches for lunch of green pepper, onion and baby lettuce. Both of us have false teeth, so we can chew anything now. We never see each other without our teeth in; it seems unfair that teeth don’t last as long as bodies do. I have a sudden image of a skeleton with false teeth, still bright and pink, and it makes me chuckle. He wonders why I’m laughing, so I tell him. He laughs too. It takes little to amuse us, two old fools.

He has brought in the eggs and watered the greenhouse. The walk and these small chores have tired him, so he goes to the easy chair to nap. I finish knitting the sweater and decide to embroider the circle of life on the back. I put one feather and one arrow inside the circle, one for bravery and one for rightness, and then I embroider a small flower for tenderness. When the kids bring the new baby on the weekend, the sweater will be ready. He is my tenth grandchild, and they have named him Seth. It is an old name, and its time has come again. I like the name.

I wander into the sunny room. Grandpère is awake and wants me to read him what he said the day before. I do.

Then he closes his eyes and says, “The Fort. It was just as I remembered. I put my pack on the ground and lit the fire. I turned the two horses loose and waited on the lakeshore. Pretty soon a small boat with only one man came over. It was David, Louisa’s man. I told him of what happened, and tears came to his eyes. He said it was measles. He’d heard measles were killing the people but hadn’t thought it was true. He told me that I could live with them, for he had plenty to do and he could use the extra hands. I was grateful, and for the first time in months, I felt like my life could go on.

“It was very different living in town. Louisa’s father was Métis and had come west from Manitoba when there was trouble there, bringing his two daughters with him. He settled with an Indian woman who came from the bush up north, and they built a wooden lodging just up the lake from the Fort. He spoke French and English and a bit of our people’s tongue. Louisa and her sister could speak all three languages well and taught their children to read and write.

“Louisa and David made me feel like part of the family, and there were a lot of chores. I did them willingly. Everything was so new to me, and they made me feel good with their praise. They were not happy that I could not speak English or French, so that winter they all taught me those languages, and I sat with the small children and learned to read and write English. It was a gift to me that I respected all my life.”

And indeed that is the truth. Grandpère always has a book handy. When he
moved in with me, he came with ten big boxes of books. We filled two bookshelves in his
room with two rows on most shelves. I still haven’t finished reading his books. He has some
classics in there. He’s read
Don Quixote
, and I saw him laughing when he was reading
it.

He continues, “Their children all had lived through the measles; they said the white blood in them knew how to live through it. I guess no one was immunized then. It was a topic never discussed around me, for I was trying to put my grief behind me.

“It was your grandmère, Clementine, who was the kindest to me. It was not long before we had a special closeness that did not go unremarked. We were still just teenagers, but a longing grew in me to have her for my wife. I could not ask, having nothing to give but the horses, and David had many horses already. The only things I brought from the bush were my knife, my father’s gun, my clothes and bedding, my mother’s metal pot and a bag of my mother’s that she had just finished beading. The pot I had given to Louisa and the purse to Clementine. The gun I kept.

“The next summer was a time of much activity. One of the happiest days was when a boat brought my Uncle Tree with his furs. He was as happy to see me as I was to see him. Not all of his family had gotten the sickness, but he knew my family was gone, for he had seen the ash pile and a fresh cairn of rocks among the trees at the berry grounds. He just hadn’t known who survived. He offered to take me away with him, and while I was tempted, I did not want to leave David and Louisa’s house, nor did I want to leave Clementine.

“So I stayed. The news around the Fort was that we could cut fir, float it down the river and get paid in coin. There were six of us who cut down trees all summer, David and I, his oldest son who was one year older than me and three Canadians from the town. There were a lot of Canadians living in the Fort, mostly half-breeds, French and Indian. They were hard workers. It took a long time to fall a tree. Those were big trees. We had to be able to get them into the lake, so they had to fall just the right way. We cut the wedge with axes, then used a long saw. It took two men all morning to cut a tree, and the rest of the day to cut it to the right lengths. We used poles to roll the trees into the lake, where we lashed them together four across and boomed them.

“When it was time, we opened the boom and let the trees go down the river. It was hard to get them moving, but once they were in the river, they took off fast. The Canadians went ahead in two boats so that they could catch them downriver for the mill. Before the snow fell, they were back. They brought us three bags of coin. I didn’t even know how much money it was. I put it on the table and said it was for Clementine.

“David just laughed and gave it back to me. He said, ‘If you want to have Clementine, you’re going to need this.’ That was all he said. He laughed, and Clementine would not even look at me. She told me after that I should have asked her first. But she would have said yes anyway, she said. That winter we worked on a house for us. We made it wooden, just sixteen feet wide and twenty feet long, but it seemed like a castle to us. We were married by the Catholic priest even though we didn’t attend the regular services. Louisa insisted, and we went along just to make her happy.

“The next years were very good. There was work around the Fort, and I made friends with some white men. Louisa’s father played fiddle, and how they all loved to dance! We rolled up the furs, and they danced on the wooden floors. They took turns dancing, one by one and sometimes two at a time, keeping time to the fiddle. I never could get the hang of that fiddle, but I could keep rhythm on the drums.

“One of my white friends was named Sven. He had golden hair and bright blue eyes and a real sense of fun. He liked to drink whisky and get roaring drunk, as he called it. The first few times, I drank too much and threw up, but then I could drink till my memory of things was hazy. I drank a lot when our first boy was young, but I still did my work in the day. Clementine spoke to me about it twice, but I didn’t listen. Then one morning after a wild party, I woke up at my friend’s house, and I was sleeping with another woman. I couldn’t remember if we had sex or not. I was so ashamed. I crept out of the furs and started home. I was just about to our house when I saw our door open and my Clementine kissing on my friend Sven, who was leaving.

“I was enraged. I could not speak to them, so I crept out of sight and kept walking till I was deep in the woods. Then I lay down and cried like a baby. I stayed there for two weeks, arguing with myself. Who was to blame? My Clementine? Did I not just wake up in the arms of another woman who I cared nothing for? My friend Sven? Maybe, for he saw opportunity in the arms of a lonely woman. Me? Yes. I had been drinking instead of paying attention to what mattered most to me, my Clementine, our son and our life together.