I wrote the letter, saying that I was the son of Edwin, the name a stranger to my pen:
Chère Yvonne,
Je sais que vous ne me connaissez pas et que le contenu de cette lettre va être surprenant et même parfois difficile à lire …
A week later, a man called, his voice so familiar that I had a moment of confusion, the impression of dreaming, of a night conversation from two years before. He told me that he was my uncle, and we spoke about my father and the family, their happiness that I’d written, the questions they had. When I explained how my father died, he asked that I not share this with my grandmother. She was past ninety and, though strong, deeply religious; the news would be devastating. I agreed to say he’d died of cancer.
I set out for Quebec, driving through Maine and New Brunswick, north toward the Saint Lawrence, into a rolling landscape of weathered stone. Late August showers blew past, gray patches in an otherwise clear sky. The landscape revealed little about its inhabitants: scant villages, Lac-des-Aigles or Saint-Esprit, hardly more than a gas station, convenience store, and a few houses lining the road. The land climbed until the horizon dropped and, far below, the Saint Lawrence extended like a plain of stone.
The fear I’d been harboring—that I’d discover a family of thugs—was quickly dispelled. I met my uncle first, the youngest sibling. He’d been a boy when my father left. He was my height, well dressed and wearing glasses, his eyes and hair dark. There were hints of my father in his jaw, though he was otherwise a very different man, as I would learn—gentler, kinder. He was a successful businessman and introduced me to the family. From time to time, he paused to say how happy he was, that they’d never known what happened to my father.
“On est bien contents que tu nous aies écrit. On n’avait pas de nouvelles d’Edwin.”
My grandmother lived in her own small apartment, with a view of the sea. When I came in the door, her gaze didn’t leave me, searching my face even as she stepped quickly past the others. Her green eyes focused through her glasses. She gripped my arm and studied me.
“Mon dieu, mon dieu,” she uttered and said I looked like my father—“comme il a l’air d’Edwin.”
The next four days were visit upon visit, conversations that lasted into the morning, tears and questions. The family hadn’t seen him since 1967, exactly thirty years, and the last time he’d called was around 1973. They remembered him saying that my brother had been born. A large framed photo of my father had stood on my grandmother’s television for decades.
I asked her what he was like as a child, and she gave this some thought.
“He didn’t cry,” she said, “and he was the only one who didn’t sing when he worked.”
My father’s older sister showed me other photographs, the stark cabin on a barren stretch of northern coast where he was born, the shot from the water, past immense stones. And at last there were pictures from when he’d returned home, a dapper young man, his jacket pulled back at the side, one hand on his hip. He resembled a land baron posing for a portrait.
Seeing pictures of the family and clapboard house, I struggled to connect this world to the man I’d known. My grandfather Alphonse had died years before, and my father’s brother Bernard as well, but no one said much about him. There were the stories I already knew about how Alphonse had made my father and Bernard box in the living room.
“They were hard men—your grandfather, and Edwin, and Bernard,” my uncle’s wife told me. She suggested that I ask my uncle about Expo 67, my father’s last visit. “It disturbed him,” she said. “He doesn’t like to speak of it.”
After dinner I did ask, when my uncle and I were alone. He drank his beer and gave this some thought.
“I saw them start a fight. Edwin and Bernard. Not with each other, but with everyone else in the bar. It really shocked me. They’d taken me to the expo. I was dressed in my best clothes and was wearing a tie. A man accidentally spilled his drink on Edwin’s arm. I just sat there. I couldn’t move. I’ve never seen violence like that. Edwin started it, and Bernard joined him. They hit anyone who got in their way. They broke everything. They … they destroyed people.”
He considered this.
“You know, your father used to call me. I was pretty young then. He said he’d been in prison because he accidentally killed a man. He said he punched him and the man fell and hit his head on the edge of the sidewalk. He wasn’t old enough to go to prison so he was sent to a detention center in the prairies. He told me it was boring.”
Though I didn’t say it, I wondered if this story had been my father’s way of justifying his absence, of making his years in prison sound accidental. It may also simply have been one of the many things for which he’d been incarcerated.
We sat quietly at the table, the rest of the family watching TV in the living room.
“How did Bernard die?” I asked.
His eyes were impassive behind the steel frames of his glasses, as if seeing who I was required not close study but simple patience.
“Il s’est suicidé aussi,” he said finally. “That’s why we can’t tell your grandmother the truth about your father. For her to know that another of her sons took his own life would be too much. She drove everyone crazy trying to get Bernard’s ashes into the cemetery.”
✴
THE NEXT DAY, I had lunch with my aunt, and she told me about my father’s last visit. We sat in the dining room, the afternoon cool and
