The Orphanage Page 5
— Screw you!
Once I started university in Montreal, it fell back to a phone call a week and five or six visits a year. Right up to end.
It was thanks to this providential convalescence that the bond was forever forged. Two months of quiet family life. Just Grand-maman, Grand-papa, me, and a boarder.
And I should point out that I wasn’t pestering Grand-papa yet. That would have made me a real monster at seven. I didn’t start until later. With my grandmother’s unspoken approval.
Since I had missed over half the school year, the nuns were thinking about holding me back a year.
When Grand-maman got wind of that she flew into a rage:
— Give me his books and we’ll soon see if he passes his year or not!
At the start of June, I went back to the orphanage. Grand-maman would have liked to keep me. But it wouldn’t have been fair to my brothers. She explained it all to me; I understood.
Those two months of convalescence meant such a lot.
They made our relationship even stronger. Our relationship developed over time— over forty years, when you think about it. It’s enough to make you wonder if I didn’t scald myself on purpose.
Sometimes I’m not entirely sure.
WHAT
HAPPENED
NEXT
It was hard on my father knowing we were at the orphanage.
It humiliated him, and appeared to be proof he couldn’t live up to his responsibilities. To take us back, first he would have to stop running off to far-flung construction sites.
The unbelievable number of construction sites in Montreal in preparation for Expo 67 gave him the chance to settle there. He also needed a wife, a housewife, someone to look after five children age six to ten.
Don’t even think about my mother. She was out of the game for good.
He had found a replacement. I won’t mention her name. You’ll see why in a minute or two.
We were told the big news:
— The Bergerons, you are leaving the orphanage. You are going to live with your father in Montreal. You are so lucky!
And so we left for Montreal.
Seven of us in the car. My father, this woman, and what we’ll still call the baby up front. The four eldest piled in on top of each other on the back seat.
What we didn’t know was that we were leaving for Montreal in early January only to come back to Lac-Saint-Jean by the end of May.
My father was on edge. He snapped at the woman. He swore. He put whole sentences together using only swear words. Accompanied by a few harsh words for the feminine condition.
Things got louder as the case of beer emptied. To the point where he cuffed her around the head. In the back seat, we were worried sick. What had we gotten ourselves into? I must have thought.
Not to mention that we didn’t even know this man all that well.
After what seemed an eternity, we arrived in Montreal.
Rue LaSalle, just down from Ontario, in the Maisonneuve district.
A two-bedroom apartment for seven people. The five children in the same bedroom. We were used to it. And five is still less than fifty!
We were still exploring the apartment when my father found another reason to shout and swear at the woman.
She made the mistake of answering back.
The five of us hid in the bedroom, the door slightly ajar, and missed nothing of the scene that followed.
My father took a run-up and punched the woman in the face. She collapsed against the refrigerator, unconscious.
My father sat down at the kitchen table and opened another bottle of beer. He saw we were watching and shouted over:
— Go to bed, you little bastards!
We were in bed in two seconds flat.
The woman came back round when my father was asleep. She found her own way to the hospital. Don’t ask me how.
A broken jaw and concussion. Just like Mother Superior. She said she fell down the stairs. That’s what they all said back then.
And when they were asked why they covered up for their husbands, they said:
— Because I love him!
The tone was set for the rest of our stay in Montreal. It would be pretty much more of the same.
Life in the apartment was sheer madness.
After work my father would stop at the tavern for several hours. The woman did her best to keep us under control, making sure we ate. And my father would invariably come home to find the apartment turned upside down, with five hyper children at ten o’clock at night.
It was time to show some authority.
He would take off his belt and beat us once or twice at random. He was drunk so he didn’t worry how hard.
It didn’t feel the same as when the nuns beat us. When he saw us writhing in pain and bawling our eyes out, he would be overcome by remorse:
— OK, OK, stop your crying. I’ll come play with you.
And there he was, our father clambering up on top of a desk, jumping onto the nearest bed. He weighed over two hundred pounds; the bed exploded. With enough noise to wake the dead.
We laughed and laughed! When suddenly the doorbell rang.
It was the police again, come to tell us to keep the noise down. The neighbours ended up getting us thrown out.
We went through three different apartments in barely five months.
Children our age went to school. In theory, at least.
We went a few times to the local school where our father had signed us up. It was a five-minute walk away: that wasn’t the problem.
The other children were the problem.
Dyed-in-the-wool Montreal kids in a working-class neighbourhood that had four pubs on every corner took great delight in beating up the “country bumpkins from Lac-Saint-Jean.”
We were a welcome distraction for them. In the schoolyard, during recess, on the way to school, before and after class— or even, for the boldest —during class as soon as the teacher had his back turned.
Fresh out of the orphanage, we didn’t know how to defend ourselves. And if we had, that would probably only have made things worse. We were outnumbered, plain and simple.
And so for the day or two we went to school, we came home in a real mess, our faces bruised, our clothes torn.
— Stop going. It’s no big deal, my father concluded.
How did he manage it with the school board? God only knows.
This rowdy bohemian lifestyle nevertheless had its fair share of good times.
Like the time we went sliding where the Olympic Stadium stands today.
When Papa was home, sober, and made us his “super pancakes.”
When he took us out for a drive in the car.
When we watched the afternoon movies on Channel 10.
It wasn’t at all like the orphanage!
My father wasn’t a bad man. He just had a lot of weight on his shoulders. And years of living alone and mulling things over in his head had led to some very bad habits. Starting with drinking.
He eventually faced facts.
But there was no way he was sending us back to the orphanage. Especially since times were changing and there was talk of shutting down the orphanage in Chicoutimi.
The new formula was social services: placing children with families. But who would ever want to take a child who had already grown up and only receive a measly monthly cheque in return?
Well farmers always need extra hands. And so off to farms we went.
As soon as we were back in Alma, I took Grand-maman to one side and asked if I could stay with her. She said yes, but only for two years.
Two years is a lifetime when you’ve not yet turned ten.
Two of the youngest left for farms right away. The youngest was first taken in by a family— a child of six is still cute —before ending up on a farm too.
The eldest and I lived for two years with our grandmother, as promised, before heading to farms of our own.
I know you’re going to say I’m re
peating myself, but they really were two years of bliss.
Two years that started with Grand-maman beside herself with anger when she found out the principal of L’École Saint-Joseph— we called him Ti-Jet —was refusing to let me take the end of year exams. For reasons you can imagine.
One meeting was enough for Ti-Jet to change his mind. And I finished top of the class.
As was only right and proper!
What happened next? Life. Life happened next. Just life.
Bibliography
MORE NONFICTION FROM BARAKA BOOKS
A People’s History of Quebec
Jacques Lacoursière & Robin Philpot
An Independent Quebec
The past, the present and the future
Jacques Parizeau, former Premier of Quebec
Trudeau’s Darkest Hour
War Measures in Time of Peace, October 1970
Edited by Guy Bouthillier & Édouard Cloutier
The Question of Separatism
Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty
Jane Jacobs
The Riot that Never Was
The military shooting of three Montrealers in 1832
and the official cover-up
James Jackson
Soldiers for Sale
German “Mercenaries” with the British in Canada during
the American Revolution 1776-83
Jean Pierre Wilhelmy
The First Jews in North America 1760-1860
The Extraordinary Story of the Hart Family
Denis Vaugeois (translated by Käthe Roth)
America’s Gift
What the World Owes to the Americas
and Their First Inhabitants
Käthe Roth and Denis Vaugeois
Going Too Far
Essays About America’s Nervous Breakdown
Ishmael Reed
Slouching Towards Sirte
NATO’s War on Libya and Africa
Maximilian Forte (October 2012)
Available or Forthcoming from Baraka Books
www.barakabooks.com
FICTION AND CREATIVE NONFICTION
Roads to Richmond: Portraits of Quebec’s Eastern Townships
by Nick Fonda
Break Away: Jessie on my mind
by Sylvain Hotte
You could lose an eye, My first 80 years in Montreal
by David Reich
I Hate Hockey
by François Barcelo (October 2011)
HISTORY AND POLITICAL ISSUES
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, The return of the nigger breakers
Ishmael Reed
A People’s History of Quebec
Jacques Lacoursière & Robin Philpot
America’s Gift, What the world owes to the Americas and their first inhabitants
Käthe Roth and Denis Vaugeois
The Question of Separatism, Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty
Jane Jacobs
An Independent Quebec, The past, the present and the future
Jacques Parizeau
Joseph-Elzéar Bernier, Champion of Canadian Arctic Sovereignty
Marjolaine Saint-Pierre
Trudeau’s Darkest Hour, War Measures in time of peace, October 1970
Edited by Guy Bouthillier & Édouard Cloutier
The Riot that Never Was The military shooting of three Montrealers in 1832 and the official cover-up
James Jackson
Discrimination in the NHL, Quebec Hockey Players Sidelined
Bob Sirois
Inuit and Whalers on Baffin Island through German Eyes, Wilhelm Weike’s Arctic Journal and Letters (1883-1884)
by Ludger Müller-Wille & Bernd Gieseking, Translated by William Barr
Back cover