The first jolt was too sudden for my father to feel. Then the cold clamped down, stars in his eyes as the air was forced from his lungs. He refused to gasp and struck the ice, but the mark was no bigger than his father’s heel above him. The effort pushed him deeper, so he stopped moving, let himself skid along the belly of the ice. He wanted to breathe. Hurry up, he thought. The cold cradled him.
He knew from having seen his father drag nets and boats from the sea and wrestle an unbroken Clydesdale to the ground that the feet stamping whorls above him were not a vain attempt for the sake of conscience. His father didn’t consider failure as he ran, the shadow of his boy stretched out at his feet. The figure below was of perfect calm, perhaps death, legs loose, palms so close to the ice that in the moment he dropped his body to strike, he could see the perfect outline of the hand, each finger.
The sky roared upward, tilted into sight. Clouds hung hard against the horizon, ink stains against the sun. His father lifted him, so great the pull that buttons skittered and froze upended.
“Réveille-toi!” Wake up! his father shouted and shook him to his feet. He struck him on the arms and back, pushing him to run. My father raced to the camp house, swept it, split the firewood, his clothes steaming as if a flame burned inside him. He loaded the iron stove, but when he held his hands above the griddle, his father shoved him back into motion. “Dépêche-toi!”
That night, eating dinner, my father swallowed his mouthful of potato and asked what had taken his father so long. The men laughed and slapped the table.
“My ace,” his father called him and told the others that his son was charmed. But a rage lingered in my father, that he’d needed to be saved, that he still saw his father as insufficient—strong, yes, he was known all along the Saint Lawrence for strength—but this wasn’t enough. He was French Canadian, trapped in this little world run by priests and owned by the English.
✴
WHEN I SAID good-bye, the horizon had gone pale, washed with a violet light, and in the pearling air, the vivid reds and yellows of the turned maples came into focus, as if they lay just beneath the surface of water.
He’d spoken for hours, prompted by my questions. At times, he sounded old and dreamy, and I was unsure of his chronology, the sheer number of places he’d worked, but I rarely interrupted.
In our silences, I knew that we both asked what the point of his life was if not the joy of being alive, in motion, moving toward something new. Work, as he described it, proved a passage out, but he did not love it. At a uranium mine, to protect his lungs, he’d had to drink two glasses of milk before going underground. His first week he gulped them down, but he saw no pleasure on the tin-colored faces of the older men. Miners were paid for how much they brought up, and he ran all day, pushing the barrow along the track. He bragged that he earned two or three times more than anyone else, but a month later, the occasional cough brought coarse, sooty phlegm into his mouth. The odor of milk was enough to make him gag.
He sent money home and visited at Christmas, playing floor hockey upstairs in the house with his younger brothers. When Bernard was around, he and my father struggled to speak, both still feeling the wounds of their rivalry. Their mother greeted my father with show, kissing his cheeks and telling everyone how much money he’d sent home. His youngest siblings were getting the education he hadn’t.
“What’s your problem?” my grandfather asked him.
“What?”
“This attitude.”
“C’est rien.” It’s nothing, my father said, unable to dispel the distance between them, his fury and desire to leave and never return.
His next job was on a skyscraper in Montreal. He liked the high wind and could even drink milk again. He made fun of those afraid of heights as he ran the beams.
Passing an Iroquois worker on a girder, he stepped on a bolt someone had left out and his ankle twisted. He liked the Iroquois men who were braver than his own and whom he copied when he hooked his heel on a beam and leaned down, his feet holding him in place as he set a rivet. The man grabbed his shirt and leaned back to counterbalance him. They hung in place. Then the Iroquois pulled them upright and let him go.
My father tried to calm himself, but his rage came on worse—wildness and a desire to run the beams unencumbered.
“What’s the point of this?” he asked Martin, a friend he’d made. The two would meet in a bar, drink, and discuss the future, but the conversation rarely got past work—jobs that were maybe a little better, but not so different—or the dowdy bar girls.
“It was … it was shit work,” he told me. “There had to be something better. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t imagine what another life might look like. I was just looking …”
On the skyscraper, at the end of each day, the bolder men ran to the corner and held the flared edges to slide down story after story until their gloves were hot and their feet hit the ground. But that payday, as they ran to the corner laughing, my father just behind Martin, he saw his friend’s pant leg catch on the end of a rivet.
Maybe it was the
