Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
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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