The Lord was his shepherd, but my grandfather wasn’t made of wood. By subtracting the date of my uncle Clinton’s birth from the date of his marriage in the church of Sainte-Thérese, you got something like four months and a bit. My grandmother married pregnant, and my grandparents fled Beauport to expunge the original sin.
As my father said:
“Your grandfather didn’t want anyone to know that there was a bit of Rasputin in our saintly Brother André.”
*
My grandfather was also a great athlete, and that’s what got him invited to Arvida.
It was before colour television and the big networks, Hockey Night and all the tralala, at a time when people had to get their entertainment locally. People in Arvida were mad for sports, outdoor or indoor. They played baseball and softball in the summer. They skated in winter. And all year long you could bowl, see hockey games, or watch wrestling matches at the Community Centre. In the park in front of the big sports complex, you could walk around or sit on a bench in front of a big grandstand where bands and orchestras played.
My grandfather was taken on by Monsieur Latraverse, who was the foreman in Alcan’s painting shop, and also a hockey coach. For two years he played hockey all winter and softball all summer, before being hired as an industrial painter in the factory. From then on, my family’s destiny was closely bound to this town of leisure and forgetfulness, where anyone could become a saint after having sinned, and where you could achieve local fame as an athlete while waiting for someone to give you a real job.
For a long time, everything went well.
Clinton was born on September 3, 1947.
Hélène on October 20, 1949.
Lise on March 11, 1951.
Douglas, my father, on November 17, 1954.
Georges on May 12, 1956.
Terry, my godfather, on May 25, 1962.
All were good children, and were raised to attend Mass twice a day out of respect for one canonical trinity, and another made up of God, the Montreal Canadiens, and the New York Yankees.
The family flourished in pace with the town, the children grew older, and when they were of an age, the three oldest went off to university.
Signs of exhaustion then began to manifest themselves.
At the age of thirty-nine, my grandmother fell victim to an inexplicable glaucoma and had to be operated on several times so as not to become blind. The operations weakened her considerably, and became more and more delicate, even life-threatening. For weeks, the wives of the bosses and workers delivered food to the terrified husband and children.
During the summer of love, in 1967, my uncle Georges, twelve years old, lost a tooth during the night. Instead of swallowing it, as happens in most such cases, he breathed in the tooth, which rattled around dangerously inside his lungs. He nearly died, and when he recovered, it was to learn that his kidneys were in very bad shape.
It was said that my grandfather never got over that.
My uncle Georges was the quintessence of the Archibald family. He was as bright and studious as the girls, as good a communicator as Clinton, and as brainy, when he applied himself, as Terry, the youngest. He had my father’s gift of the gab, and even surpassed him in sports.3
It’s always a bad omen for a family to see fate bear down on its most illustrious member. The wind was shifting, it’s clear, but no one saw it. When he left the hospital, Georges shut himself up in his room and had himself brought down in his armchair to go and pass, hands down, the Ministry exams, making up in a few months all he’d missed over almost two years. He then went back to his room for five months, and to prove the doctors wrong who’d said that he’d never walk again, he came downstairs under his own steam at Christmas and celebrated New Year’s on his feet. In many ways, he’d come to embody the Archibald family’s resilience.
And so even if the curse was upon them, my grandparents thought that everything would work out. Georges was getting better. Their older children began to have children of their own. Not even twenty-five years old, my father, the most typical Arvidian of the lot, was making money hand over fist with his Bojeans boutiques and his wagers on golf. He owned about half of the hockey and baseball teams in town. Twice a week he went up to Quebec City with Georges for his dialysis. He left him at the Laval University hospital, headed for Montreal to pick up jeans from his warehouses, then returned to the Saguenay, picking up Georges on the way. To entertain us, he brought back from the Parc des Laurentides terrifying stories of hitchhikers glimpsed in the wan morning hours, or of strange lights in the sky.
*
It’s important to underline: this town whose years of glory I celebrate, I myself only knew it in decline, along with the decline of my own family.
In 1978, the year of my birth, Arvida was administratively fused with Jonquière. On the ground everything looked the same, but its status had changed.
Arvida, a town unto itself, and a model city, no longer existed.
The same year saw both the town’s apotheosis and its swan song, a brief burst of brightness at a time when its future was already darkening.
Pierre-Paul Parent, alias Pitou, my father’s henchman and my uncle, so to speak, along with the O’Keefe representative Roland Hébert, organized a hockey match that would pitch former Montreal Canadiens against the stars of Arvida’s commercial league. Pitou owned the Station, a fashionable bar at the time, which occupied a handsome building on the Rue de Neuville that had once been the Arvida railway station, and today is a funeral home.
In the opposing ranks were Jean-Guy Talbot, Henri Richard, Claude Provost, Gilles Marotte, Ken Mosdell, and many others. In the nets, I believe, was the former Rangers goalie Gilles Villemure. The coach and manager of the team, who during the exhibition games served as referee, was Maurice Richard, the Rocket. Pitou appointed himself scorekeeper and house announcer.
The Arvida players were no pushovers. All had played at least to the Junior level, including my father, who wasn’t playing at that point because he’d hurt his knee and my mother was pregnant, but the family legend was that he’d had his nose broken by Guy Lafleur at the Remparts camp a few years earlier.
Among them, Yvon Bouchard had played in Europe, and Mauril Morisette and Réjean Maltais in the American League, while Germain Gagnon had made the Islanders camp in New York. All represented the fragile memory of a time when the balance of power wasn’t yet predetermined, when the far corners of the countryside produced humble athletes as good, if not better, than those in the urban centres.
An important page in regional history was written, in fact, when in February 1910, the Canadiens hockey team came to contest an exhibition game against the Chicoutimi Hockey Club. The Canadiens, led by the marksmen Didier Pitre and Newsy Lalonde, were unable to score a single goal against the legendary Georges Vezina. They lost 11-0, and left, their tails between their legs, but with an important consolation prize: Vezina himself, who tended their nets for sixteen seasons, only to die, just like that, from a coughing fit, before having blown out even forty birthday candles.
Of course, no one was going to abscond with a major league club after the match at the Community Centre. The dreams of glory had had their day, and the former Canadiens, in any case, hadn’t even arrived by bus. They’d come down in a cavalcade, four by four in big Buicks, Molsons tucked between their legs. That was no reason to knuckle under, certainly. And it was no accident that the Arvidian who led the assault was himself a goalie, and doubtless the player who’d come closest to a career in the National Hockey League. Claude Hardy had played in the AHL for the Springfield Kings and the Rochester Americans, had played several games in the NHL, but had decided to swap his dreams of glory for the love of a woman and a job as fireman that his father and a priest had found for him.