Читать книгу Strangers in the House - Candace Savage - Страница 7

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LITTLE HOUSE

Toute saison embellit la maison de nous amours.

Each season embellishes

the house of our love.

JEAN-GUY PILON, Comme eau retenue: Poèmes 1954–1963

FOR ALMOST HALF a lifetime, going on thirty years, I have lived with my family in an unassuming wood-framed house in a quiet city on the northern edge of the Great Plains. Five minutes’ walk to the west lies the shining, low-slung valley of the South Saskatchewan River, with a view, across the water, of downtown Saskatoon and the fairytale silhouette of the Bessborough Hotel. My young daughter and I were lucky enough to arrive here in springtime, on a big, blue, blustery day when the trees were juicy with new-leaf green. I can still remember the sappy joy we felt the first time we walked down our street, amazed by the extravagance of this welcome.

That was in 1990. We had landed in Saskatoon following a five-year stopover in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, an excellent place in its own way but not exactly a garden city. In Saskatoon, we found ourselves ten degrees of latitude farther south, though still technically in the subarctic climate zone. To us, however, our new surroundings were exuberantly tropical. What’s more, our surge of elation reassured us that we were truly home. Diana had begun life in Saskatoon, and now she was back on the cusp of her eleventh birthday. I was a stubble jumper, too, though that is a longer story.

Diana and I had left town when she was a toddler, following the sudden death of my husband, her dad. Despite the best of medical intervention, he had succumbed to a runaway infection at the age of thirty-two, the kind of thing that almost never happens these days but happened to him. Ever since, I had been reeling, spinning Diana along in my wake, and now, finally, we were ready to settle, to find our way back again.

This time around, home was to be the ordinary bungalow that anchored the corner of the block. Like most of the dwellings on the street, our house qualified as what is known in real-estate jargon as a “character home.” In other words, it was old. It was drab, as well—sided in white-painted boards accented with gloomy brown trim—and, although I didn’t see it that way at the time, in obvious need of care and attention. The carpets were worn and dingy; the ancient clawfoot tub in the bathroom scarred and stained with rust. The cupboards in the kitchen had been repurposed from somewhere else and might have appeared, to other eyes, as makeshift. But to me, these notional deficiencies were all selling points. The last thing I wanted was a jewel box that had to be protected from a child with a soldering iron in her hand or rollerblades on her feet. We needed a place that could cope with the rough-and-tumble of real living.

But, of course, that wasn’t the whole story. I didn’t fall in love with the house just because it was comfortably worn in. There was something else, a je ne sais quoi, that instantly made me feel welcome here. Perhaps it was the light that fell, trembling, on the sidewalk that led to the front door. The light that spilled into all the rooms through the large, well-proportioned windows. The prismatic glint that was caught by the old glass knobs on the bedroom doors. Modest as it was, the house had been built with pride, perhaps even with love. Its wide baseboards and solid fir doorjambs spoke of generosity and connection. Like the trees along the boulevard, the house was rooted in place.

As I longed to be.

In the days I’d spent packing all our worldly belongings into boxes in preparation for the leap south, I had been surprised, time and again, by a wordless daydream in which a gigantic spruce tree plummeted out of the sky, crash-landed out on the prairies, and hurried to push down roots. A spruce tree on the prairie? That doesn’t make any sense. Why couldn’t I be a clump of blue grama grass or a wild sunflower instead? After all, prairie plants are famous for their strong, deep systems of roots. “I’m a little prairie flower,” went an old song that my mom used to sing to me, “growing wilder by the hour.” That was more like it. Yet, incongruous as the image was, there was no mistaking its meaning. I had come home to stay. And what would those roots do, as they pressed fiercely into the earth? For roots are not mere holdfasts. They are seekers, and there is no way of foretelling how deeply they will reach.

WE’D BEEN LIVING in our house happily, uneventfully, for two or three years before a stranger popped up in our midst. It was Diana who first made the connection. One afternoon, as part of a school project, she and her classmates caught the bus from Greystone Heights School (now home of the Saskatoon Islamic Association) to the downtown library. In my mind’s eye, I can see them clattering up the broad, zigzag stairway to the second floor and elbowing through the doors of the Local History Room. That evening, she returned home bearing a scrap of paper on which she had written, in a careful, penciled hand, a list of all the “heads of household” ever to have lived at our address, with the dates they’d first moved in. This information she had extracted, year by year, from the library’s comprehensive collection of civic directories. With a disregard for privacy that makes the digital present look prim, these volumes provide a permanent, publicly accessible record of names, addresses, occupations, and affiliations, extending back, in the case of Saskatoon, to the early 1900s. The series ceased publication around the turn of the millennium, overtaken by concerns about our see-through online identities.

The final entry on the list, the most recent, was the first to catch my eye. “1990,” it read, “Savage, Candace.” Look at that: just by showing up, I had earned a place in the history books. Above that momentous entry, eight other occupancies stepped back through the decades, with two in the 1980s, one in the 1970s, and then a single long tenancy that stretched all the way back to the 1940s. (“Savage, Candace” will have to hang on until the end of her days to break the previous record for continuous residency.) Another three notations rewound the tape through World War II and the Depression of the 1930s. Apart from my own, the names were all male—a fact that was irritating but unsurprising, given the overall invisibility of women in the historical record—and completely inscrutable. Who knew who these guys might have been, and who cared, really?

But there was one entry that gave us pause: the very first one on the list. “BUILT 1928,” it read. “Blondin, Napoleon S.”

“Nothing before that, kidlet?”

“No, really, Mom, I checked. There wasn’t anything here, not even an address, until 1928.”

“So, the first family here was French?”

TO UNDERSTAND WHY this possibility was so startling—why Napoleon S. Blondin was the one name on the roster to lodge in our memories—you have to know a little about the origins of Saskatoon. The idea for a permanent settlement on this bend in the river was conceived late in the nineteenth century by a Methodist-preacher-turned-colonizing-entrepreneur from Ontario, the Reverend John Neilson Lake. A heavy-browed man with a patriarchal beard and a Bible verse to suit every occasion, Lake journeyed west in June of 1882 as the leader of an expedition organized by the Temperance Colonization Society of Toronto. His mission was to examine the immense block of windswept prairie—almost 500,000 acres straddling a 40-mile-long stretch of the South Saskatchewan River, or over 700 square miles in all—that had recently been granted to the Temperance Society by the Canadian government, at the come-and-get-it price of a buck or two per acre. Having purchased the oceanic expanse of the “great lone land” from the Hudson’s Bay Company little more than a decade before, Canada’s inaugural prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, had staked his political future on filling the prairies—that no-man’s-land at the heart of his National Dream—with a prosperous, agrarian society.

To satisfy this ambition, settlers would be called for by the thousands, but not everyone need apply. As one of Macdonald’s supporters explained, the goal was to flood the prairies with members of “an energetic and civilised race, able to improve [the land’s] vast capabilities and appreciate its marvelous beauties.”¹ In taking up this challenge, the Temperance Colonization Society aimed to go the government one better by achieving not mere “civilisation” but absolute rectitude. Through the simple expedient of banning intoxicating beverages from the colony, the temperance advocates believed that they could liberate society from all manner of strife, perversity, and sin. The Reverend Mr. Lake was commissioned to choose the location for a town in which this “glorious resurrection” (as he once termed it) could be initiated. He was seconded in this task by several other members of the Society—Messrs. Black, Grant, Hill, Goodwin, and Tait, by name—together, according to his account, with “a Frenchman for cook, and a half-breed to look after the horses.”²

In recalling this expedition several years later, Lake failed to acknowledge either cook or hostler by name. Presumably they were local hires, recruited from the long-established Francophone and Métis settlements that, even then, were dotted across that part of the country, at places like Talle-de-Saules (Willow Bunch), Montagne de Bois (Wood Mountain), Montagne de Cyprès (Cypress Hills), and Vallée de la Qu’Appelle (Qu’Appelle Valley). From 1865 onward, these communities had been served by French-speaking Roman Catholic fathers based at the Mission de Saint-Florent at Lebret. Although Lake must have passed through the mission, his diary does not acknowledge this “Papist” presence.

By the end of July, the little party of self-confessed tenderfoots finally reached their promised land. Once on site, they wasted no time in choosing a location for their new settlement. They were assisted in this decision by the Dakota chief Wapaha Ska, or Whitecap, who had recently settled, with his community, on a small reserve within the borders of the Society’s grand domain. There was no better place than this, Chief Whitecap assured the new arrivals, for a future river crossing.

With that practicality out of the way, Lake hurried back to Ontario and returned the following spring, 1883, with a sturdy band of “earnest, determined” Methodists from Toronto, who were to get the colony up and running. By mid-August, a townsite had been surveyed on the east bank of the river, with a main street (christened Broadway because it was wide enough to accommodate a U-turn by a team of horses) that ran north toward the river and then northeast along an already established trail leading to the Métis community of Batoche. Lake named his new settlement Saskatoon, after a local berry. By September, a number of houses were poking out of the ground, straight-backed as prairie gophers keeping watch by their holes. “Had a general jubilation,” Lake reported, “all the settlers around . . . to the number of 30 or 40 people.”³

By then, one catastrophe had already been averted through Lake’s quick and decisive action. He had discovered, to his consternation, that the surveyors whom the government had hired to demarcate the Society’s estate were laying it out in long, narrow strips with river frontage, “like the [Métis] lands at Red River,” following a pattern borrowed from the seigneuries along the Saint Lawrence River in New France. What kind of backward, Frenchified thinking was that? Lake immediately rushed off to Ottawa for urgent consultations with the prime minister and other top-ranking officials. Soon, the telegraph lines were buzzing with orders to lay out the land in the officially approved American-style square sections.

But not even the ardent and well-connected Reverend Lake could prevent the successive disasters that were about to smite his godly initiative. Through an unholy confabulation of poor planning, inadequate infrastructure, ill-conceived government policy, internal discord, and uncooperative weather (on the prairies you can pretty much count on that), the project quickly foundered, and by 1885, even Lake was out, leaving, by his accounting, “about $8,000 of hard cash in the wreck.”⁴ When violence ignited at Batoche that year, provoked in large part by the government’s prolonged refusal to acknowledge the right of Métis settlers to their riverfront lots, the Temperance Colony was essentially done for. Attracting incomers would prove extremely difficult for many years to come.

Nonetheless, the fledgling settlement carried on bravely as it had begun, as an outpost of strict and particular Protestantism. Even after the railway arrived in 1890, change was glacially slow. When a cluster of stores and houses sprang up on the west bank of the river (near the new railway roundhouse) and took over the name “Saskatoon,” the east-bank community shuffled the syllables, more or less back to front, and rechristened their settlement “Nutana.” (As city archivist Jeff O’Brien notes, the phonemes were “scrambled, no doubt, because of the small likelihood that anyone would ever want to live in a place called ‘Nootaksas.’ ”)⁵ The place was a backwater, caught in a listless eddy.

Then, in 1903, a trainload of settlers from England, recruited under the slogan “Canada for the British,” steamed into the station on the way to their own promised land, a tract farther west known—lest anyone mistake their intentions—as Britannia. Many of them stepped off the train, gazed at the dizzying horizons around the platform, and decided they’d come far enough. With these new additions, Saskatoon and Nutana were well on their way to becoming an enclave of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. A WASP nest.

Three years later, when the two municipalities came together with an adjoining hamlet to form the City of Saskatoon, the event was marked with patriotic speeches and a flurry of Union Jacks. A parade wound through the muddy streets to the stirring beat of an anthem of British supremacy, “The Maple Leaf Forever”:

In days of yore, from Britain’s shore,

Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came

And planted firm Britannia’s flag

On Canada’s fair domain.⁶

A few years later, in the 1910s and 1920s, the city would open its doors to a flood of immigrants from other parts of Europe, including the “men in sheepskin coats” from the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Galicians, Ruthenians, Poles. The self-appointed WASP elite made no secret of their disdain for these “aliens” and “non-preferred Europeans.”⁷ Soon, the population of the city began to segregate, with most “ethnics” residing in the working-class neighborhoods on the west side of the river, where they enjoyed ready access to purveyors of strong drink, and citizens of British ancestry, upright and proper, ensconced on the gracious streets to the east. And yet, a man with a frankly French name had managed to gain a toehold inside this ultra-respectable domain. Who was this Napoleon S. Blondin, and how had he crossed the divides that marked, and in some ways still mark, this city?

ALTHOUGH I HAD tucked Diana’s list away for safekeeping, there was no immediate way of answering the questions it had aroused. We set our curiosity aside and continued with our lives. It was then, as we settled more deeply into our house, that we began to sense something about it that we hadn’t noticed at first. Something downright peculiar. Most houses are designed to provide clearly separated spaces, each with a designated use. But our house had been built to an unusual, flow-through plan, in which every room provides access to adjoining spaces. For instance, the back porch opens into the kitchen, which opens into the dining room, which opens to the living room, which, in turn, leads to a small front hall. From there, you can loop through the master bedroom, via a mini-corridor, back to the dining room or, alternatively, continue straight on to the den. A doorway on the far side of the den provides access to a steep set of stairs leading up to the second floor, where three more spaces are laid out end to end, like train cars. Except for the bathroom, every room in the house has two or three doorways, each of which leads in a different direction.

On a practical level, this design has a few, readily apparent disadvantages. If you’re the kind of person who likes to go into your room and shut out the world, it wouldn’t work for you. But for us, the flexibility of this layout has turned out to be surprisingly accommodating. Opening the spaces to one another has also freed them up, to an unusual degree, for reinterpretation. Thus, the “master bedroom” was once Diana’s room, then a guest room, and is now my office. And the fact that every room is designed to make connections and to take you somewhere you need to go—isn’t that exactly what stories are for? Every episode leads you on to the next and the next, so that it is never quite clear where one ends and another begins, or which door to choose, or when it’s the right time to loop back to the beginning. This house isn’t just a house. It is a story.

IT MUST HAVE been around the time of Diana’s memorable visit to the library, give or take a few months, that a new and unexpected happiness found us. Who knew that True Love could walk up to your door, ring the bell, and take a seat at the dining-room table? As it happens, it was the very table where a few weeks earlier I’d sat alone and clipped an ad from the Companions column of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. “To enjoy travel, the arts, books and other pleasures,” the ad promised. “For a relationship based on equality and love.” Yes, please, I’ll have one of those. And now, here he was, that “friendly, attractive professional man, mid-40s,” in our dining room, serenaded by the splash of Diana’s pet turtles, the rustle from her cage of white mice, the miasmic wheeze of our smelly old dog. If he’d made a run for it, who could have blamed him? But he didn’t run; he lingered. In fact, when he headed home that evening (and wouldn’t you know it, this being Saskatoon, he lived just down the block?), we’d been tête-à-tête, in conversation, for six entire hours. Where does the time go? Twenty-six years later, we are still at the same table, still talking nonstop, and Keith is father, by adoption, to Diana and an adored grandpa to her two little daughters.

Back in the 1990s, nothing spoke of love like moving in together and getting the kitchen done up. And so one day, after Keith’s sleepovers had morphed imperceptibly into permanent occupancy and our search for a place to call our own had brought us back, again and again, to this very house, we realized that this was it. It was time to call in the contractors. Out went the battered old kitchen cabinets and down came the kitchen walls, choking the room with dust, splinters of lath, and a volcanic outpouring of wood-chip insulation.

As we gazed, aghast, at this scene of destruction, we were surprised to notice bits of flotsam poking out of the wreck, half-buried in crumbled plaster or caught between shards of wood. An old-fashioned button-on shirt collar, badly frayed along the crease. A grubby book cover emblazoned with the figure of a cowboy astride a bucking bronc. A cluster of tattered pages from a cookbook: Boiled Frosting, Brown Frosting, Milk Frosting, Chocolate Frostings I through III. Each item was torn and dirty and must have once been discarded. Why else would they all have ended up among the rubble inside our walls?

But soiled and damaged as these relics were, they were also eloquent. That collar had been abraded by some man’s body. The book, with its cover once firmly affixed, had been held in a child’s hand. The recipes had been fretted loose by a woman’s repeated use. The connection these mementos offered was personal, intimate, filled with mystery. Which unknown young student had completed this painstaking page of calculations, every one of them correct? What woman had spent an afternoon in a home-decorating store downtown and come away with a tally card featuring an exotic lady playing an exotic stringed instrument to an exotic bird? For whom could this secretive valentine have been intended, if not, perhaps, for me?

You cannot guess, I grieve to say,

Who I am; though, come what may—

Every day when you pass by,

For your love, in vain, I sigh.

Indeed, that was the question. Who had left these traces—these echoes of vanished lives—embedded in our house? For the sake of romance, I wanted them to have belonged to Napoleon Blondin, in company with his wife and a houseful of happy kids, but there seemed no way to be sure who had left them behind. After all, a lot of people had lived in this house over a lot of years, and these oddments could have slipped down the cracks in the floorboards or sifted through heating ducts—or something—at any time. So I tucked these enigmatic curiosities away for safekeeping along with Diana’s list and more or less forgot about them.

But every now and then, I’d come across my grubby stash when I was looking for something else, at the back of a drawer or under a pile of books. Once, overtaken by an uncharacteristic zeal for tidiness, I decided that several items, including two photographic negatives, were too damaged and disgusting to keep and rashly threw them away. (“If I’d known then what I know now, I would never have parted with them”: the lament of the pack rat.) On the plus side, I had at least begun to examine the items in my reliquary more attentively and to notice things about them that I’d overlooked before. For example: the books represented in the collection had all been published in the 1910s; an order form, never completed or submitted, had been issued in 1928. (It provided fill-in-the-blanks options for procuring “x” hundreds of feet of Equity Binder Twine from the United Farmers of Canada, Saskatchewan Section.) Even the homework bore a wobbly annotation that dated it precisely to January 15 of the following year. And who had lived in this house in those early days? Napoleon S. Blondin and family.

It would take me a decade to notice the final, confirming piece of evidence, though it had been staring me in the face all along. One of the pieces in my hoard was the lid of a small cardboard box, torn and flattened but still bright as new. Made to hold plasticine (“an educational amusement,” the box proclaimed), it showed two fabulously talented children, both sporting pudding-bowl haircuts and floppy bows under their chins, engaged in fashioning remarkably detailed models, an elephant for him and a cow for her. I must have looked at the picture a dozen times before my eyes focused on the smudged inscription across the elephant-maker’s ear. A round, childish hand had written “Ralph Blondin.”

So it was true. The fragments in the walls had been deposited, however unknowingly, by the first people to live in the house, a family I was beginning to think of as adopted kin. More than a mere theory of storytelling, the house had turned out to be an abandoned archive, a midden of tantalizing clues. Binder twine: did that mean my Napoleon was a farmer? A cheesy detective novel about stock speculation: did he enjoy taking risks? The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: perhaps the woman of the house had been ambitious, on a quest for finer things. The evidence was suggestive but insubstantial, murmured conversations just beyond the range of hearing, fleeting gestures caught by the corner of an eye.

And what was one to make of the ghostly figures who gazed out of the single brittle negative to survive my purge? Held to the light, it showed a group of adults arrayed in front of some kind of machine, a biplane, perhaps, or an old-fashioned automobile. In the center, three women, dressed in the long skirts of another era, stood clustered arm in arm. They were bracketed, to left and right, by two gentlemen, one in a flat cap and open-necked shirt, the other slouching stylishly in a fedora and necktie. Imprisoned in their impenetrable black-is-white world, their hair was bright, their faces dark; their eyes glowed eerily. “You cannot guess, I grieve to say, / Who I am. . .”

And so the Blondins came to be acknowledged as a spectral presence in the house, like shadowy and undemanding guests. It was pleasant to imagine that all the walls we’d left undisturbed (everywhere but the kitchen, that is) still held traces of their time here. Yet it was also possible to ignore them entirely for weeks or months on end and focus on our own preoccupations. And then one day, this easy, come-and-go relationship was shaken by a chance encounter with another ghost, another Napoleon Blondin. This one had been dead even longer.

I WISH I could tell you precisely when this second Napoleon came into view. Until recently, I thought that all I had to do was reach for a certain book on a certain shelf in my office, turn to a left-hand page, and there he’d be, a few lines from the top. But book in hand, there’s no trace of him, and so I cannot say exactly how I first made his acquaintance. What I do know, however, is that my yearning for a settled existence—the desire for deep roots that had called me back to Saskatoon—has kept me on full alert for years. What does it mean to be here? What does it mean to live on the northernmost edge of the great North American plains, only the second generation in my lineage to be born here? What does it mean to be a prairie person?

If there’s an organized course of studies dedicated to pondering these questions, some kind of Prairie Fundamentals 101, I haven’t found it yet. And so my education has been self-directed, episodic, eccentric, and I’ve spent many happy hours rummaging in libraries and archives or consulting with other learners, in person and online. Like a shopper at a flea market, I’m not always sure what I’m looking for, but I sure do know a treasure when I see it.

The second Napoleon Blondin was one of those lucky finds. His name is featured on the Métis Museum website (in a left-hand column, toward the top, so at least I got that much right) among 114 signatories to a petition dated September 2, 1880, and addressed to the governor general of Canada, the very British Marquis of Lorne. The petitioners identified themselves as the “half-breeds of the Lakes Qu’Appelle and environs,” and almost all had French surnames: Desjarlais, Poitras, LaPierre, Blondin. Maybe they’d heard rumors about the plan to hand over huge chunks of the North-West to private interests like John Lake and his determinedly unmerry band. Certainly, the petitioners were keenly aware of the Indian treaties the government had signed in the previous decade with their relatives and friends. “Hello,” the petitioners interjected. “Remember us? We’re still here.”

In the politest possible language, with assurances of “profound respect” and “perfect submission” to the authorities, the members of the small Métis community laid out their concerns. They wanted recognition of their right to hunt, fish, and trade in their traditional territory. They were anxious about the status of their church, the Roman Catholic mission at Lebret, asking that it be allowed “the free and tranquil enjoyment of its possessions.” They were alarmed by the lack of local government and the looming collapse of the buffalo herds. But amid all these urgent worries, one matter topped the list. Their very homes were at risk.

We the undersigned beseech you, the petition read: “1st, That the Government allow to the Half-breeds the right of keeping the lands they have taken or which they may take along the River Qu’Appelle.”⁸ These, of course, were the French-style riverfront lots that the Reverend Mr. Lake found so incongruous.

The people waited, but there was no answer, and soon their worst fears began to come true. Several families lost their land to the Ontario and Qu’Appelle Land Company, another private consortium with a vast acreage at its command. In 1882, when the petitioners renewed their appeal to the government, this same Napoleon, or Pollyon, Blondin again appeared among the signatories. But as before, there was no response, not even so much as a routine acknowledgment. Anxious and exhausted, many of the Qu’Appelle Métis packed up their households and left the district, hoping to find a sanctuary to the north and west.

If I’d known the whole story at the time, with its sequels of violence and loss, I would have been dismayed. But at the time, all I noticed was that thrilling name: Napoleon Blondin. By now, I was used to thinking of my house as a box filled with stories about its first occupants. But what if it held more? What if it was a gateway to a larger landscape and a grander narrative, une épopée des plus brillants exploits, a deep story of French and Métis presence in the Canadian West? With the appearance of this second Napoleon Blondin, the walls of my office melted away to let the past come rushing in, and the room filled with dancing rivers and the songs of the voyageurs.

Auprès de ma blonde qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon

Auprès de ma blonde qu’il fait bon dormir.

But this was no time for sleeping. A story was calling to be explored. Something told me this was going to be important.