often received cards from my mother’s parents in Pittsburgh, he almost never spoke of his family in Quebec, other than to say, “My brother and me, we beat up all the kids in our village, so you and your brother should stick together.” And then he’d look a little angry, probably because of all the fights he’d been in.
The only time I thought about where he came from was at school, because I spoke French there and often read about Quebec. My mother loved French but didn’t speak it, and she told me that my father grew up speaking it even if he almost never did now. He claimed it was useless, but she insisted on making me learn it.
That evening, as I did my homework, I kept thinking about the card. I approached the chair where he was watching TV.
“Est-ce que tu peux m’aider avec mes devoirs?” I said. If he checked my homework and spoke in French, I might figure something out. Maybe there were questions I could ask in French that I couldn’t in English. Besides, I was always curious to hear his voice change.
“Okay, viens,” he told me, but as soon as my workbook came into his big hands, he furrowed his brow. His eyelids drooped and he hunched in his chair as I rattled away, explaining a translation assignment. When I stopped, he made a suggestion on how to write a sentence about a moose, but accidentally used the French word for mouse instead—une souris. I corrected him, telling him that a moose was un orignal.
He lowered the book and stared at the TV. Black smoke rose from an aerial view of a city. He seemed upset, as if this were a place he knew. All around him hummed familiar danger, the electric buzz of his irritation.
When he switched to English and said, “This isn’t a good time,” I felt relieved.
✴
MY MOTHER HAD clear blue eyes, not dark like his, and silvery stripes in her light brown hair that, when she pulled it back in a ponytail, reminded me of the markings on a cat.
“Whose eyes do I have?” I asked. We were alone in the kitchen while she made goat cheese and I pretended to do my homework. I spoke as if the question weren’t a big deal, though my teacher had made us read about eye color and told us that to have blue eyes the genes had to come from both parents. My mother said that mine were probably from her, unless someone in my father’s family also had blue eyes, but she didn’t know. I didn’t bother to explain how it really worked and asked, “Why don’t you know?”
“Because I’ve never met them. He’s not close to them anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh,” I said, grudgingly. I fiddled with my pencil and considered my workbook. “And whose hair do I have?”
“I had blond hair when I was younger.”
“And my nose?” She’d often told me that I was lucky not to have her small nose. She called it a ski jump, though I saw nothing wrong with it.
“Your nose is your father’s. You have his real nose.”
“His real nose?” I repeated. “His nose isn’t real?”
“He had his real nose smashed in a fight. Doctors rebuilt it and gave him a new one that’s smaller and very straight. I never saw his real one, but I’m sure you’ll have it when you grow up.”
I was sitting at a picnic table, the kind you saw in parks but never in other kids’ houses. My life was nothing like other kids’. I never said “Mom” and “Dad,” but “Bonnie” and “André,” and no one I knew had changed homes so often. Summers, we used to stay in a trailer on blocks in the valley, with goats and German shepherds in pens. My first memories were sunny days and broken-down motors, the mountain just above us, no electricity or running water, and our drinks in wire milk crates set in the stream. Winters, we moved to places with heat, rundown houses where my father got electricity using jumper cables, clipping the ends above and below the meter after stripping away the rubber. From my mother’s stories, I knew she’d gone to art school in Virginia but ran away with a draft dodger. I pictured a guy really good at dodgeball, but, as if angry, she said he was dodging war, not balls. She met my father in Vancouver while working as a waitress, an encounter that—because he’d once described it to me as “She served me ham and eggs, and I left with her”—made me hungry whenever I thought about it. After that, they traveled British Columbia, living out of a van and fishing, an existence I fantasized about—mornings waking up and going straight outside to the river, no bedroom to clean, no school to worry about. But they decided to have children, and my perfect life ended just before I was born.
Whenever I asked her questions—about war or why it was wrong—she answered carefully, explaining with so many details—Vietnam, corrupt government, the loss of individual freedom—that I didn’t understand much. She talked to me as if I weren’t a child but rather a very old and serious man.
Unlike her, my father barely answered whenever I asked about his family. “Why don’t you like to speak French?” or “What did your parents do?” earned me few words: “There’s no point,” or “He fished. She took care of the kids.” Then he told me about his travels or fights, like the time he hitchhiked cross-country to Calgary and went to a party and got in a terrible fight over a beautiful woman.
“This bruiser,” he said, “was two or three times as big as me. We were throwing each other across the room. We broke the table and chairs and knocked all the pictures off the walls. There wasn’t anything we didn’t break. That guy was tough, but I didn’t let myself get worried. You get worried in a fight, and you’ve had it. So I kept hitting him, and pretty soon everyone at the party started cheering me. They were originally his friends, but he was arrogant, and I was the better fighter. They could see that, so I guess they wanted to be on my side. Each time I got him down, I’d say, ‘Stay down,’ and everyone else would shout, ‘Stay down!’ but he’d get up, and then I’d hit him five or six times, and he’d fall on his ass again, and everyone would yell, ‘Stay down!’ I tried to be nice, but that guy was big, and he kept shaking his head and trying to get back up and then I’d have to hit him again. It wasn’t easy, but I finally made him understand.”
If I asked him whether he’d had worse fights, he told one story after another. His confrontations with bruisers, this being one of his favorite words, often had strange endings.
“The bruiser was so strong I had to bite his nose to win. We were on the docks, by the fishing boats, and I got him down and bit his nose and just hung on until he started crying. Sometimes you have to do things like that to win a fight.”
He told me about journeys, from Calgary to Tijuana in a truck without brakes, or driving an old Model T along Alaskan railways to get to towns not connected by roads. Whenever a train came, he swerved off the tracks, and afterward he and his friends hefted the Model T back on.
My favorite was the time he and a friend were driving through Nevada and picked up a Mormon. He drove so fast that the Mormon prayed in the backseat and wept to the Lord until my father, racing at over a hundred miles an hour, slammed the brakes. The Mormon flew onto the dash, his back against the windshield so that the car was briefly dark and all my father saw was the screaming face of the religious man. The friend kicked open the door and they chucked the Mormon out. He grabbed at the earth, kissing it—“Like the goddamn pope,” my father said.
I didn’t know what a Mormon was, but I’d seen the pope on TV, descending from an airplane and kissing the ground.
“I
