polarized, separatism was taking hold, and the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was growing. Operating out of Montréal and trained in Palestine, terrorist cells intended to start a Marxist-Anarchist revolution and establish independence and a workers’ society. Between 1963 and 1969, an average of one bomb was planted in Québec every ten days. The FLQ targeted businesses, banks, armoured cars, McGill University, and the homes of wealthy English families. They destroyed a statue of Queen Victoria and set off a bomb in the Montréal Stock Exchange, injuring twenty-seven people. A group of FLQ members were even apprehended on a mission to destroy the Statue of Liberty. The only similarity between this episode of history and my father’s life is the FLQ’s bank holdups, though I’m pretty sure the perpetrating members didn’t run off to casinos afterwards.
In October 1970, what was to be termed “the October Crisis” occurred. The FLQ kidnapped James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montréal, and, five days later, Pierre Laporte, Québec’s popular Minister of Labour and Immigration. The Québec government requested the help of the Canadian Armed Forces, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proclaimed the War Measures Act. Civil liberties were suspended and hundreds arrested. Troops lined sidewalks and roofs, and tanks roamed the streets. In an arena, three thousand students gathered in favour of the Front de libération du Québec, chanting F-L-Q. Columnist, politician, and future premier of Québec, René Lévesque, wrote his approval of the government’s response in the Journal de Montréal: “L’armée occupe le Québec. C’est désagréable mais sans doute nécessaire aux moments de crise aiguë.” (“The army has occupied Québec. It’s unpleasant but probably necessary in times of acute crisis.”)
The day after the War Measures Act was invoked, the FLQ killed Pierre Laporte and left his body in a car trunk near Montréal. James Cross was later released, and in return his kidnappers were allowed to leave the country. Several of the FLQ’s leaders were exiled to Cuba. Around that time, my father’s own period of chaos and uncertainty came to an end, and after incarceration for a bank burglary in Hollywood, he was deported back to Canada.
History and his untraceable journeys leave me trying to understand his ideals. He wanted success, to live like the wealthy English, but this longing grew in absentia from the culture that had created it, and lasted well after that culture had changed. When he spoke of Québec, he did so with distaste, telling me that it was poor and violent, that priests ran everything, though he sometimes admitted that it was no longer the same. He’d seen it changing when he’d last visited his family during Expo 67.
In the final year of his life, he told me many stories, among them one about two brothers splitting wood in his village. One brother would set a piece on the block and the other would split it. They had been working for a while when, just as the axe was coming down, the first brother put his hand under the blade, yelling “Stop.” The axe took his hand off and embedded itself in the wood. The brother later claimed that the face of Christ had appeared to him in the wood grain, more perfect and beautiful than any image he’d seen in church. The curé himself went to look at the wood. After prying the axe loose, he washed the blood off, but saw nothing. The brother died from loss of blood, and at his mass Curé Félix-Jean spoke of the beatitude that carried him away, Jesus having called him to his breast.
Telling the story, my father sounded distant, dreamy even, as if he believed it, as if the story and the act of telling a story, of imagining, still had power over him, and then his tone changed.
“I grew up with that guy,” he reflected gruffly, but quietly, as if afraid to undermine his story. “He didn’t seem any better than the rest of us.”
• • •
History forgives. Reading through records of the past, I have found a gradual absolution, a few explanations for centuries of hardship and brutality. Framed by these stories and in the light of so many lives and years and changes, humanity seems less disconnected and therefore less mysterious, and yet the mystery of individuality remains, despite our insignificance.
My mother once told me that in the first year she and my father were together, they lived out of a van and drove across Canada, and finally through Québec. They followed the southern coast of the St. Lawrence, passing through one community after another until they reached his village. He had grown a large beard and said he would be unrecognizable to his family, and yet he refused to stop. Hearing this story, I tried to sense how he had felt seeing his home, the coast of his youth, the village where he grew up and where his mother lived – and not stopping.
In thinking about this, I slowly began to understand that his journey was not a return, but rather an extension of his flight and quest. In this, he greatly resembled the historical figures who preceded him: the travellers, the sailors and hunters who left France and voyaged to other lands in hopes of riches, who gave up their homes and families, many of them never to return – and whose children continued to journey: to the Francophone cultures of the Great Lakes, to Oregon or California or Maine, down along the Mississippi to la Nouvelle-Orléans, or west among the Métis of Manitoba.
More and more, he has seemed emblematic of a certain past and less of an anomaly. He loved to swear and tell stories, and in both activities I see the presence of an older Québec. The profanity there responds to the Church, an eighteenth-century expression of frustration and a form of resistance against the oppressive clergy – Québec French uses expletives derived from religious terms: tabarnak and câlisse and ciboire and ostie and crisse (corresponding to tabernacle, chalice, ciborium, host, and Christ), among many others. The Québécois take not only the Lord’s name in vain, but all of his utensils and trappings and family as well.
Reading books of French Canadian folktales, I found hints of my father’s humour and adventures in the deeds of the trickster, Tit-Jean, “Little John,” who fooled the devil on numerous occasions while being devilish himself. The more I read, the more I wondered how many of his stories were inventions or exaggerations inspired by those old tales. Though he’d tried to cut himself off from his past, it had lived more fully within him than he realized: his journeys and words were echoes of resistance.
The model for my father was precisely the sort of man the Church had spent centuries trying to tame and on which it had nonetheless depended for its spread. Missionaries followed trade, trying to domesticate the very people who opened the path for them. They needed the brave and self-sufficient voyageurs, and so wanted those men to need them in return. French Canadian stories and profanity are the negotiations of an older culture with a new repressive authority, the traces of who a people were before or have always been, and the encoding of old values and narratives into new expressions. The trickster becomes all the more necessary when faced with such authority. He is a reminder of the people’s strength, one of those who stands against the rich and thumbs his nose at the puritanical. The heroes of Québec’s Wild West, its coureurs des bois, could not be so easily forgotten.
Gradually, I have come to understand that my father’s working man’s humour was that of the trickster who wagered the world on his wits. The seductive daughter of the idle and obese rich man returned in his stories as models and actresses in casinos and at resorts. The devil himself was recast as a diabolic pimp paring his fingernails beyond the glitter of the dance floor. And the harsh priests found themselves embodied in stern policemen and prison wardens and bank owners. The trickster, the handsome criminal, eyes impassive behind sunglasses, straightened his tie before picking up a gun.
• • •
Until the end of my father’s life, he and I lived in a state of almost perpetual conflict. Years later, when listening to me describe my childhood, my aunt once said that Québec had changed, but my father had not – that he’d raised us as if still living in Québec before the days of the Quiet Revolution. He hated school, and our greatest conflict grew from this: his insistence that I quit when I was fifteen and my insistence that I continue.
The themes of the talks and conflicts between my father and me lasted until the final weeks of his life. He wanted me to drop out of college and live with him. He was now using heroin regularly, and he told me that he hoped to end his life in this way. In his voice, I heard