Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
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from parish to parish in the vicinity of Montréal: Pointe-Claire, Pierrefonds, Laval. That’s where they were in the autumn of 1759, when the French army fell to the English on the Plains of Abraham, and, a year later, when the entire colony of New France surrendered to the British. Then, in the 1800s, Hilaire Sureau’s descendants made two surprising leaps: first, to the extreme west of the former French province (now known by its British overlords as Lower Canada) and, second, in a shocking breach, across the border into the laps of the English. It was from this toehold on Georgian Bay in Lake Huron that Napoléon and other members of his family would set out for Saskatchewan in 1904, to establish themselves in the wide-open spaces west of Saskatoon.
Some twenty-five years later, Napoléon, by now accompanied by his wife, Clarissa Marie née Parent, and four young children, would finally touch down in this house. Around them spread a grid of streets, laid out by the Temperance Colonization Society fifty years before, that paid tribute to the glories of the British Empire, with streets named Albert, Victoria, Lorne. How had the family coped with being planted in this “foreign” soil? What kind of a welcome had they found in the Last Best West of the Canadian prairies?
As I was wondering how to clothe the bones of fact with flesh and feeling, a promise of help materialized out of thin air. An email message appeared in my inbox offering to put me in touch with an actual, living descendant of Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “Howdy,” it began invitingly, “I just turned up your query for information about my wife’s grandfather via a Google search.” Imagine: a granddaughter. Apparently, by poking around on the internet, I’d left a trail of digital footprints that led directly to my inbox. And it seemed that Napoléon’s granddaughter—her name was Lorena—had also been working on her family tree and was willing to share what she had learned. But would we get to the heart of things? Would she be willing to share family secrets with an inquisitive stranger?
3
Je n’aime pas les maisons neuves: Leur visage est indifférent; Les anciennes ont l’air de veuves Qui se souviennent en pleurant.
I don’t like new houses:
Their face is uncaring;
Old ones have the air of widows
Who remember through tears.
SULLY PRUDHOMME, “Les vieilles maisons,” Les solitudes, 1869
AN EXCHANGE OF messages ensues. When I learn that Lorena and her husband live in Regina, a few hours’ drive to the south, my first impulse is to pack my bag of questions, hop in the car, and turn up in time for tea. In my mind’s eye, I can already see myself ringing the bell, waiting eagerly on the front step—but, no, that would be pushing it. It’s one thing to stalk someone else’s ancestors from a decorous distance and quite another to intrude, uninvited, into her day-to-day routine. Better to phone ahead.
The voice on the other end of the line is low-pitched and restrained. No, Lorena hadn’t really known her grandfather Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “I was born a month before he died,” she says. “They carried me into the hospital so he could see me. That was all.” Mentally, I rifle through my knowledge of Blondin vital stats. Napoléon died in Saskatoon in the fall of 1946. That would make Lorena a couple of years older than me.
But she’d heard about him growing up?
“Yes, of course. My dad talked about him. He was ‘Paul’ in the family, but I always call him N. S. My dad said N. S., my grandfather, was proud of his ancestors. Proud to be French Canadian.”
“And you? Do you speak French?”
The line goes dead for an instant. Have I insulted her already? How would I feel if someone I’d never met called me out of the blue and started asking personal questions about what I could and couldn’t do? But instead of the click of a cutoff connection, there’s an exhalation of breath.
“No French. Not a word,” she says. “Couldn’t get it through my thick head. I remember the French teacher at my high school, meeting him one day in the hall. ‘You should be a natural for this,’ he said. ‘Blondin. You’re French.’ But we only spoke English at home. I couldn’t get it.” Another pause. “Just couldn’t.”
I think of my very different experience: how my schoolteacher father, whose own lost, ancestral language would have been Plattdeutsch, or Mennonite Low German, fell in love with the vision of a bilingual Canada (and possibly, innocently and briefly, with a fellow teacher who was similarly inclined, adding fuel to the flame). We’re talking about the early 1960s, around the time Lorena would have been struggling with French in school. As for me, I was a kid in small-town Alberta, with no opportunity to test myself against the challenge of a second language and no awareness of the storm of French–English tension brewing in the country during those years. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was always top of the news, but its findings were wasted on me. All I heard was a static hiss of meaningless, grown-up verbiage.
And yet the vision of a country in which the English and French languages enjoyed equal status in national affairs touched me personally. Every morning when I came downstairs for breakfast, I’d find my patriotic, and usually very dignified, father reading L’actualité, the French edition of Maclean’s newsmagazine, as he pedaled away furiously on his exercise bike. Here was the unexpected, and slightly flushed, face of Canadian bilingualism.
For my dad, putting some muscle into improving his French had become a pleasure of citizenship. And when it was finally my turn to start learning a second language, at the age of fifteen, I was très heureuse. Swotty to my father’s sweaty, I spent my weekends reviewing French grammar and conjugating irregular verbs. (Some people really know how to enjoy themselves.) But if it hadn’t been for that chance to start learning French, or if the language had, for some reason, felt beyond my reach—as it had for Lorena Blondin—I would have grieved the loss. And, as far as I could tell, it wasn’t even the language of my ancestors.
I cast around for something to say, but everything I think of sounds lame. “High school can be so miserable,” I mumble, but fortunately, Lorena isn’t listening. Instead, she’s telling me about a conversation she had with her own dad.
“He told me my grandfather didn’t speak real French. ‘Métis French,’ he said. I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Quebec French.’ But he insisted. ‘No, Métis French.’ ”
“What do you make of that?” No meandering through my own thoughts now: I’m all attention.
“I’ve always wondered, I guess. I have dark skin and brown eyes, kind of Indian looking. I got teased at school. You know.” A beat of silence. “When I told my dad, he said, ‘You just tell them you’re not Native. You’re French.’ So maybe the dark skin comes from my mother’s side, people from Eastern Europe. We haven’t found Métis connections on our family tree. Have you?”
I tell her about the second Napoléon Blondin and my inconclusive research. “But something could still turn up. I’ll let you know if I find out anything, for sure.”
“Okay,” she says. “You know, it’s about your house, that’s why you’re doing this, right? My grandfather built a house in Saskatoon, a new house, and he lost it. That’s the story I’ve heard.”
My heart skips a beat.
“It was on—I’d better check.” She breaks off, and I hear a rustling of pages, as if she is leafing through a file. Please let it be this house. Please. I hold my breath.
“Crestwood,” she says, “it was on Crestwood.” Wrong address.
THE MINUTE I put down