From my family, I learned the word agrémenteur, slang for “storyteller,” a play on words: agrémenter, “to embellish,” and menteur, “liar.” I wasn’t as interested in the facts behind his stories, the prisons themselves, or the police records. The memories of fictions and fantasies are as real as memories of any other experience.
But still, there was so much I wished I could ask him. I tried to recall his voice through the phone, his silences so intense that I could hear each leaf’s rustling fall to the frostbitten ferns outside my window.
✴
ONE AFTERNOON, MY uncle and I drove along the windy coast to the southwestern edge of Gaspésie. We stopped at the old farmstead where my father had grown up, where my grandfather had been raised. A rutted dirt track rose from the main road, the overgrown land making a steep ascent to higher fields.
We walked from the farmstead, where nothing—not a sign of house or foundation or barn—remained, down to the rocky shore. My uncle pointed out les islets, a few weathered ridges rising from the water, where my grandfather and his father before him had fished. My aunt had shown me the place in old photos, nets pulled up from the channel, the scattered fish a bright shade of gray among the rocks.
We drove to the nearby village of Les Méchins: ramshackle houses in a few lanes next to the stone church that had been the focus of many stories, where Curé Jean, the priest my father had hated, had preached. He died during my father’s last visit, in 1967, a topic of some speculation.
At the cemetery, we stood before the graves of Alphonse and Bernard. I considered how quickly this part of the world had changed, how a generation gap could make my father’s youngest brother into the type of businessman that my father himself had wanted to be. But I knew it wasn’t that simple. There would be no easy answer for why my father had chosen his life.
My uncle began telling me that I should consider staying, maybe getting a job, but when I said nothing, he let his words trail off, and we just stared at the headstones. I knew that I hadn’t yet satisfied my hunger for experience, and that soon, in his eyes, I’d resemble the brother he’d lost. In my travels, I’d come to recognize the loves I shared with my father—of chance and the pleasure of risk, of loss and solitude, and of our hungers themselves, not the need to cure them, but the joy of living with them, of the way they fill us and carry us forward. I recalled being a teenage boy, entranced by his stories of adventure, and the nights when I sneaked out and stood by the highway, letting the rigs pass close—their wind against my face. I wanted to find him in my own risks, to feel all that he had, to arrive at the dark edge of another life, so that, when I turned back to my own, it would shine.
My uncle and I stood within sight of the church, both of us silent. The wind from the gulf was strong, so relentless I could imagine a man going mad living and working here. Briefly, I leaned back into it and felt it hold me in place.
Author’s Note
I WROTE THE first draft of what would eventually become this memoir in March of 1995, when I was twenty, only three months after my father’s death. Unsure of the story I wanted to tell, I wrote it quickly, during my college’s spring break. I had yet to consider the difference between fiction and memoir, and at the time I called it a novel because I wanted to be a novelist.
During the two weeks when I hammered out the draft, I couldn’t have imagined that seventeen years of rewriting would follow. While working on another novel and numerous smaller projects, I rewrote the memoir dozens of times, convinced it would never be published, that it was a story I had to write for myself. For about ten of those years, I consciously chose to make it a novel, changing numerous details, though keeping the core facts, and when I decided to rewrite it as a memoir, I realized how the repeated telling of any story separates it from the original event and gives it a life of its own. My father, after so many decades of telling his own stories, might have experienced something akin to this, and I spent years digging through the layers, trying to reconstruct the past and find what I wanted to write.
I have often been asked if it’s all true. I describe the scenes that involve me as accurately as possible, but a memory is a work in progress, and it’s hard to know how much the ensuing years have shaped what I recall. During the editing process, the time line has occasionally shifted, and some events have been told closer to each other for the sake of continuity. This seemed favorable to adding irrelevant or repetitive detail. As for my father’s stories, he told so many that the transcripts from any given year might be in the thousands of pages. As I got older, he told them differently, revealing or possibly adding minor details to make them more appealing to me. Through his family, I have confirmed much of what he told me about his youth, though their own versions occasionally vary. Given that I became less interested in the banks he robbed than in the influence of that knowledge and those stories on me when I was young, I have not gone to great lengths to verify the numerous details of his criminal record, though the court documents of my parents’ custody battle confirm a number of them. Furthermore, he lived and was incarcerated
