My Favourite Crime. Deni Ellis Bechard
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about his age, a sixteen-year majority being required in order to join the men who would be leaving. The village priest, Curé Félix-Jean, heard what he had done and informed the company recruiters, thereby forcing my father to spend another long winter with the women and children.
“He wanted to be with the men,” my aunt told me. “He hated being trapped in the house and having to do children’s chores.”
In Les Méchins, snow arrives as early as October, and trees do not bloom until June. My father managed the farm, taking care of pigs and horses and chickens, and the next winter he finally crossed the St. Lawrence in an airplane and worked in a logging camp. The summer afterward, he was hired on a dam on Northern Québec’s section of the Canadian Shield, an immense watershed whose many hydroelectric projects now power the cities of Canada and New England. He sent 70 to 80 percent of his paycheques home so that his five younger siblings and the children of his sisters could have better educations.
By the time he was nineteen, he’d worked in a uranium mine and on a high-rise construction site alongside teams of Haudenosaunee ironworkers. Then, after his best friend fell to his death, he quit and broke contact with his family, changing his life as if the reels of two very different films had been spliced together. His youthful journey of exploration and freedom from winter and home and church was transformed into the life of a criminal. He spent the next fifteen years safecracking and carrying out armed robberies, working his way west across Canada and then south through Montana to Las Vegas and finally to Los Angeles. He robbed jewellery stores and banks, and laundered hot items and cash with the mafia, or so he claimed when he bemoaned their bad rates. Not surprisingly, there were occupational hazards to such a life, and he spent half of that time in Canadian prisons and American penitentiaries before he was deported to British Columbia. He lived there until his death at the age of fifty-six.
As sensational as his life seemed when he told it, a simple question remains, one that has long haunted me: How does a young man from a fishing village in rural Québec align himself with such ambitions? Other questions tumble from this one: What was the source of his audacity, his longing (even desperation) to escape and to erase all traces of the past, driving him to find a new place in an unfamiliar landscape? Where did that revolution occur? Even now, so many years after his death, I recall his hatred of his home, his hatred of Québec, and above all his hatred of the Catholic Church.
• • •
Curé Félix-Jean animated many of my father’s stories and many that my uncles and aunts still tell. His vigilance kept them from smoking and drinking and trysts. He especially disliked the young men of the village. Whenever he spoke with one he particularly disdained, he cleared his throat noisily, took out his handkerchief, and hung it by two corners like a veil before the face of the boy while still speaking to him. Then he spat into it, the dirty fabric jerking with its load of phlegm.
Some of my father’s stories, though, were more typical, such as his rage at being punished for having no sins to tell at his first confession.
“We worked,” he told me. “We did nothing but work, and that fucking priest made us invent sins. We didn’t have toys. All we did were chores. We got up and fed the animals and picked up wood or worked in the fields. When was there time to sin?”
As with the English “breakfast,” the French déjeuner means “to break fast,” dé- meaning “un-” or “undo,” and jeûner “to fast.” The French have eliminated this by having un petit déjeuner, their déjeuner now meaning lunch – a nonsensical notion – whereas the Québécois call their three meals déjeuner, dîner, and souper. The first Friday of each month, my father and his sister (and eventually their younger siblings) walked over a mile to the church for mass and then home for breakfast, and then walked back to the village for school. During confession, the curé condemned sins so loudly that those who were waiting heard everything. If a young woman confessed to losing her virginity before marriage, he yelled, excoriating her in such precise terms that the entire congregation knew the place, time, man, and general mood of the deflowering.
Once, after morning confession, my father’s older sister realized that they would not have time to return home for breakfast, and not wanting to endure the ferule of the nun who taught her class, she skimped on Hail Marys to take my father home for breakfast. Curé Félix-Jean noticed and not only berated her but made her remain in penance until after school began. She and my father went the day without food and were also punished by the nun who taught their class.
The story my father told of his ultimate disillusionment occurred when he was only seven, during a Sunday Mass sometime near the end of the Second World War. In the village, a man had left his wife, and a woman her husband, and the two had moved in together into a small house not far from the church. Curé Félix-Jean was so incensed about this immorality that he preached fiercely on the sanctity of marriage and then on God’s wrath against sinners. He told the congregation that the couple should burn. They all knelt, heads bowed, as he commanded them to pray that the fire of heaven would descend and destroy the two sinners.
The image he painted was so clear, so compelling, that my father slipped from the pew where his family sat near the door and let himself out of the church, escaping the attention of the congregation. Before his mother could notice his absence, he was running to the house of the condemned couple. He crouched on the forest side and peeked into their window. The man and woman sat at the table, having breakfast and talking.
“They looked happy,” he said. “There was no fire. I kept waiting for the fire to come down and burn them, and I was worried that I was too close to the house and might get burned up too. But when the fire didn’t come, I knew that fucking priest was a fake.”
The next nine years were shaped by his determination to leave. The revelation, as simple as it was, had left him certain, he said, and free. He blamed the Church for selling out the impoverished French Canadians to wealthy industry and told me how, on election day, men in suits arrived and gave the children pop and each fisherman five dollars to let the strangers cast their ballot for them. This, too, he insisted, was the fault of the Church.
My father’s last visit to his family was in 1967, after a significant bank heist and shortly before a seven-year prison sentence of which he would serve half. Thirty years later my aunt told me how, during that stay, Curé Félix-Jean died.
“Edwin hated the curé,” she said. “We joked that maybe Edwin killed him. But that’s silly.”
• • •
In the 1960s, the Quiet Revolution released decades of pent-up desire for change, the exultant anti-authoritarian energy of the time pouring into Québec. Much of this was due to the modernization of communications and the facility with which ideas were transmitted, but the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959 was the catalyst. Duplessis, often simply called le chef, dressed in black and ruled (this being the better word than governed) from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959 – almost twenty years in total, a period sometimes referred to as la Grande Noirceur, “the great darkness.” The Roman Catholic Church supported his programs, at one time employing the slogan, Le ciel est bleu; l’enfer est rouge – “heaven is blue, hell is red,” blue being the colour of his party and red being that of the Liberals against whom he ran.
In 1960, the province elected the liberal government of Jean Lesage, whose slogans were Maîtres chez nous and Il faut que ça change – “Masters at home” and “There must be change.” The revolution had no precise beginning or end. The desire for new ideas and freedoms already existed, though they had long been suppressed. French Canadians wanted a stronger place in Canadian society, as well as social, economic, and political advancement. Within a decade the province was transformed: institutions were secularized and nationalized, ministries created to replace Church-run institutions, private and foreign interests no longer dominated trade. The birth rate dropped to the lowest in Canada, and Francophones distanced themselves from both Canada and the Church. By the 1970s, they no longer referred to themselves as Canadiens français but as Québécois.
By this