Les Grandes Bergeronnes

Les Grandes Bergeronnes

My grandfather’s grandfather was a coffin maker. His hands were huge meat cleavers, calloused and heavy. Milling black pine from the shores of the Saint Lawrence river into Black Pine boxes. Digging graves with pine handled shovels and filling the space in between the dead and the mourning with long arcs of dark brown dirt that flew back and up through the air like a movie rewinding.

My grandfather’s father, my great grandfather—though he never did get the chance to be so great—inherited the craft of coffin making and, by default, that of grave digging. He practiced until it killed him. By filling himself in with the dry brown dirt he’d tossed over his shoulder and up onto the bank of the freshly dug grave he was standing in. He hadn't quite finished it when his father watched it bury him alive. 

I suppose they had to dig him out, to put him in a black pine box of his own and into a different grave, dug by another. I wonder if the coffin was one he’d made himself, with his slightly smaller hands, gnarled and knotted. I wonder who had to scoop the deadly dirt out and around his limp and strong body, and if they were afraid that it would happen again, to them. Or perhaps they’d left him in the hole he’d dug. 

To reach this isolated region of the north coast, La Cote Nord, there’s a fifteen minute ferry across the Fjord at the Saguenay. It’s nothing special, a brightly painted red, blue and yellow car ferry, but you can get out on the rumpled deck and stand in the wind to stretch your legs. 

The seven hour drive up the coast, northeast from Montreal, is long but beautiful. The landscape shifts from pastoral farming bliss to small fishing villages. White churches with zinc oxide spires dot the autoroute, shining bright against the surrounding fields. Like sentinels, they guard each and every hamlet you pass, until the Laurentian mountains burst forth, the ancient granite core of North America. The Fjord cuts into their silhouettes. On the other side of the Saguenay are short and dark evergreens and not much more until you reach the Bay of Fundy and the open North Atlantic. The churches north, past Tadoussac, are smaller, humbler, their plain wooden belfrys painted to match the snow that covers the earth six months of the year.

If you’re lucky, like I am, you can catch dolphins with enormous frontal bulges, not bottlenecks, no, not hammerheads. I’m getting my dolphins confused. Anyway, you can catch them, with a camera lens, as they bob and weave around the small metal boat, churning the water white. Whale watching is very popular here. In the summer months, charters file a couple hundred plastic trenched people a day, up and down the rivers in Zeppelins for seventy five dollars each. Past my favorite camping spot, Les Petites Bergeronnes, The Small Rocks as we say, the tourists’ phones slip out of their recycled blue sleeves to capture memories of a place they’ll never come back to.

In winter the fjord just about freezes over solid. The painted ferry has steel icebreakers on the front and the back so that it doesn't have to turn around as it docks. The narrow path cut into the thick surface of the ice wouldn’t allow for such nimbleness. The cars drive on and off in one fell swoop,  like a parade. 

The first time I slept aux Bergeronnes, I arrived an hour after sunset. Typical. In the darkness, I set my tent up on a wooden platform wedged between enormous and undulating pink boulders. the sound of blow holes and broken water emanated from just beyond the fire’s light. So soft. They made a gentle poof poof sound. If you didn’t know that it was whales you would have never guessed it.

Aux Bergeronnes— the water is deep, and there are no beaches. The bedrock drops straight down from the surface like an underwater cliff. My fire, tent and I are sea level, river level, fleuve level. Next to us are millions of liters of deep flowing brine. The whales are within arms reach, if you had excessively long arms. Or a wetsuit. Or a cane, like in old movies. I imagine that the dew on my face is the breath of whales as they exhale into a world that they will never enter. The lights of the south shore, la Gaspesie, twinkle. The lighthouses point the way not to go.

My great Grandmother was left a widow. She never remarried. I’ve never been told what she did to support her family, but from the looks of her in the photos hung on my wealthy uncle’s wall, I assume she was a witch. She’s standing next to her soon to be deceased husband, holding her baby, my grandfather, in her arms, beads around her wrists and throat, invisible smoke in her eyes. 

Some people say she rented out my grandfather to the neighbors as a handy boy, but the word they use is prete. Which means to borrow and implies no exchange of money.  It's also the same word for priest, Pretre. The spelling is a little different but pronounced the same.   

She took my grandfather out of the missionary school before his seventh birthday. He read a different way, the numbers and letters were movable objects, interchangeable and imaginary. The nuns beat him badly for being dyslexic. But they couldn't even pronounce that word. Perhaps it was invisible in their mouths. Like glass marbles. It’s the double letters, and the silent ones that are the trickiest. There are some patterns we remember, like snake stripes, or the eyebrows on an Orca and Rottweiler. Or the constellations.

   

Why do the whales come so close to this shore? These funny fuschia rocks so far from civilization. I’ll tell you because I know you’ll never ask, you’re always looking at your phone. 

The river Saguenay drains from Lac St-Jean, a shallow green lake in south-central Quebec close to Alma. Alma means soul in Spanish, but “village in south central Quebec” to me. The lac makes the river chock a block full of delicious-to-whales plankton. When the smaller Saguenay runs out past the berth of the ferry and into the strength of the St Lawrence, the force of the stronger, larger river pushes the plankton back towards the shore and up to the pink cliffs of La Cote Nord. 

In the morning I unzip my tent and watch, amble past through the veil of my netting, long finned Pilot whales, Gray whales, Belugas. In feather down nylon sleeping bags on a bed of rocks, I count cetaceans. Too large to swim up the mouth of the Saguenay, they wait, cumbersome and elegant, in the St Lawrence for the rivers to bring their food to them. I like to close my eyes and listen. I've learned to love the sound of them even more than the sight.

 

Nuns can’t beat magic out of a person. Only inwards, deeper. When my Grandfather was fourteen, my great grandmother gave him a sack of flour and a white birch canoe.  They carried it over a sloping field of grass, wild strawberries and that purple flower that tastes like either honey or onions, and down to the edge of their little village. She told him, follow la Riviere Saint Laurent, jusqu'à Sept Iles, Seven Islands. There’s a mill there. You’ll get work there. With your dark, sorrowful eyes like mine and hands like your Grandfather’s. Under the plain church spire, next to the graveyard where her husband had lived and died, she heaved a baby from one hip to the other. Arms full. The neighbors' clothes drying on the line, calling with flaps and snatches. Return me. The boat floated next to bedrock, suspended by disbelief.

He pulled his Father’s frame into the trunk. He paddled with large flat spruce hands. Past the submerged and blubbery bodies of giant mammals singing songs that scientists have learned to decipher using algorithms, which he could hear solely by listening. Go north, east. He followed the stars.

Sandy beaches are rare this far north; what you find is usually gravel and rocks. But as the sun began to set behind a small island the first night of his trip, he pulled his canoe ashore the soft beach to sleep. Not far from there is where we have our family bonfire once a year in August. Where we dig for clams, looking for the pimple like holes in the wet sand, like pores in our skin. We wear my uncle’s collection of rain boots and follow the tide lines with a shovel. Crying out in glee when the mollusks squirt sea water defensively up and into the air. Into our matching faces. We all like getting dirty. It's a family trait.

No match for our hammer hands, we collect them together, into an orange pail from Home Depot, until it’s heavy enough to make us grunt as we carry it up the 100 stairs, not so slowly falling down into the ocean. On to the deck of my grandfather’s chalet. 

He made himself a fire too, and bannock in a cast iron skillet that used to sit in the cupboard in our house. I've made pancakes in it. It's heavy and calloused and I keep it well oiled. I couldn’t tell you where it is now. Not that you, or anyone else, would ask. I suppose it’s something that only I know the existence of. And consequently the misplacement of too. 

He told himself that night, told the stars, that he would build with his own hands, a fine pine cottage 100 stairs up on the bluff, with a view of this island, and the lighthouses across the fleuve in Gaspesie. 

I lied about my grandmother, or rather, I’ve gotten a lot closer to my own mother since I left, so now I know more about her and her history. Our history. 

She did remarry, quite soon after her husband’s death. She had four or five more children, I’m not sure how many because so often babies died then. And then her second husband also passed away. Probably in a much less dramatic way because no one seems to remember how it happened. 

Widowed twice, I suppose she wasn't as desirable a wife anymore. Not much has changed. Or perhaps she was burdened as a bad luck woman, killer of husbands. Can you be a widow maker if you only widow yourself?

My grandfather returned, the same way that he came, in the same white birch canoe. Bigger and stronger, richer and better able to care for his mother and her new family. Or maybe that’s not how families work, though I wouldn’t know I don't have one anymore. He opened a general store and became a father himself. You'd think being dyslexic would have made it hard for him to count and account, important skills to run a general store. So they say. But we think that eating and living is done by other means, deeper than paper and blacker than pen. Older than numbers and tasteless to those who use oxide to shine their shrines. My mother tells stories of sneaking into the old timey candy jars and the weird old candy she used to steal. Of spring when the fur traders would come in from the even deeper bush carrying the carcases of annoying animals that weren't even good to eat. And Mumming. If you don't know what mummers are, have I got a story for you. Another time.

He would tell his children, my mother, and the nine others, of the empty stockings in the Christmases of his youth. When the neighbors’ children would throw orange peels at him, because he had none. Not even an orange, or a stocking. Because stockings are for feet and he'd have been cold with his strung up on the wall. Oranges were an exotic Christmas gift then and there, a strange fruit, from a far southern flung land called Florida. Pronounce Flow-reed. Imagine getting an orange now. You'd cry.

He eventually would sell them in his store, oranges. It was a busy little place and he did well, until they put in the autoroute. My mother says he kept the discarded orange peels in a box, like pot pourri. The smell of them. He’d kept one in his pocket on his trip to Sept Isle, my uncle says, to smell the oils when he was tired. He crushed them in his hands, worn so young and rooty. Just the skin, though; he had never known the flesh inside. The essence was enough.

When my grandmother started to bear the newest line of us, we came out four sons, then four daughters, then one of each again for a total of ten. That lived. Twenty childbearing years between the oldest and the youngest. Can you imagine bearing children over twenty years, stillbirths and miscarriages and sudden infant death syndrome in between and it wasn’t even by choice. The church could guarantee big families by denying confession to any wife if she went more than fifteen months between pregnancies. The wiveless, childless men, in white robes- in contrast to the black habit of the nuns- would, under pain of hell, insist that a good catholic mother must hurry and be with child again soon, if she wanted to dispel her sins, through a mesh veil, into a small pine box. 

My family is larger now, then it gets a little smaller, then someone marries into even more. We ebbs and flows like a tide. What ties us together, I wonder, like fluorescent buoys. A shared name, a resemblance, the passing down of traditions. Binded by a pie crust recipe, the tendency towards moles on our backs, a grave digging trade. We’re sewn into each other like the line of the autoroute is on the map, the counties overlapping each other, from all the places we’ve lived to all the places we’ve been, to where we’re from. There’s a small plot in a graveyard of us, lettered into the granite, dug from the sloping hills of the Laurentians, the namesake of the river that is the namesake of the man who brought the French settlers here in the first place.