I have never watched it again, or read the book, maybe not wanting to lose the clarity of what I felt. I have only read Ron Kovic’s Wikipedia page, learning that he wrote the book manically in the fall of 1974, around the time I was born. I can’t analyze the film in any technical way or judge its merits. But it did what I’m not sure art could ever do for me again, at a moment when only art could.
Disobedient Ancestors
(2009)
My father was born in 1938 in Rivière-au-Tonnerre, Québec, a town on the north coast of the St. Lawrence and an eleven-hour drive northeast from Montréal on modern highways. There the river joins the gulf and is over 112 kilometres wide. In the early twentieth century, ferries plied the seaway during the few clement months before ice choked it and small airplanes were needed to carry men across to timber camps. Blizzards closed the coastal roads and the mail made it through in a truck with caterpillar treads, creeping along rises like a prehistoric insect.
Rivière-au-Tonnerre had plenteous cod stocks, boasted telephone lines and occasional electricity, and was managed by Robin Jones and Whitman, a family company whose founder was originally from the Channel Island of Jersey. My grandmother, Yvonne Duguay, was born in 1908, one of five sisters whose mother died when they were children. At twenty, Yvonne married Étien Boudreau, a young accountant for Les Robins, as the company was known, and the couple had two daughters and a son before Étien died suddenly of an ulcerated stomach. After several years as a widow, Yvonne married my grandfather, Alphonse Béchard, a dark-skinned fisherman from Gaspésie who had a reputation for fighting and for having once gotten drunk and blown up a large black bear with a stick of dynamite. Soon after, my aunt was born and then my father, Edwin. A year later, Alphonse decided to return to his family land and paternal fishing waters and moved them all to the south shore, to a village called Les Méchins, on the southwestern cusp of the Gaspé Peninsula, where it meets the region known as Le Bas-Saint-Laurent.
My grandmother, who lived to be 104 years old, often lamented that move to the impoverished landscape of Gaspésie, to a house without electricity or telephone or running water, on a ledge of flat land above a narrow road that threaded the ragged coast. Below was a steep descent to the shore and a series of rocky islands, where Alphonse built a salmon weir. From the house, another steep path led up to a range of mountains on which he maintained his potato fields and where my father worked from spring to fall each year until he was sixteen.
The name of the village, Les Méchins, was a bastardized version of les méchants, “the mean ones,” which some say was taken from a folktale about a bellicose giant who once lived there and terrified the Indigenous people before missionary priests drove it off; another version claims that it was the Indigenous inhabitants who needed subjugating. There, the St. Lawrence spans almost forty-eight kilometres, and for those working in the high fields on clear days, the stony face of the north coast appears from beyond water, distantly, like the moon.
• • •
My father hated Québec. He’d broken contact with his family before I was born in 1974, and I never set foot in Québec or met my father’s family until after his death, when I was twenty. Thanks to his stories, the province had occupied too great a place in my imagination, and it took me years to see it not as a land of hardship and oppression, but as the modern, secular, highly educated, and prosperous society it is today.
When I was a child, the stories he liked to tell best were those of hard work in mines or on dams, or of his travels in the Yukon and Alaska, or through Nevada and California to Tijuana. He described fights, sometimes over women, or random confrontations that sounded more like sport. Working, he’d seen a logger sheared by a frozen tree that split and spun suddenly into what he called a barber chair. At a uranium mine, each miner was obliged to drink two glasses of milk to coat the lungs before he went underground. That first week my father laughed at the free drinks and gulped them down, but he saw no pleasure on the tin-coloured faces of the older men. A couple of months later, when the occasional cough filled his mouth with coarse, sooty phlegm, the odour of milk was enough to make him gag. The desire for a better life stayed in his gut like an inexplicable hunger.
My father rarely spoke of his family in these stories, only occasionally making a brief reference to an uncle or cousin, and just as quickly he would look down, his dark eyes distant, and change the subject. From all that he told, he seemed to have lived in the company of men, and the stories he liked best were of clever men, those capable of outsmarting police or bosses on construction projects, the tough in his village who, after a few whiskeys at the local pub, would jump up and kick the ceiling with both feet for everyone’s entertainment. He told and retold his own feats: his escape from a lumber camp before the arrival of a flood, or how he won a brutal fistfight with a big German by biting his nose and holding on with his teeth until the man began to cry.
Much later in his life, when he was less certain of his wit and lived alone in failing health, he told other stories without joy. He mentioned his family now, the less charming violence of his father, the poverty of his village, or the first time he saw electric light and indoor plumbing. He was no longer the trickster, the clever, self-sufficient adventurer who’d crossed the continent repeatedly, but an aging man recalling a boyhood in a Catholic village, haunted by a history so complex that it would take years before I could understand how it had shaped his life. He spoke of the absence of his family as if it were a mystery to him. He spoke of it with great effort, and within that mystery, behind it, in everything he said about Québec, was the Church.
• • •
Gaspésie comes from the Mi’gmaq word gespe’g, which means “the end (of the earth).” French explorer Jacques Cartier found safe harbour in Gaspé Bay in 1534 and erected a cross to claim the territory for King Francis I, but not until 1608 did Samuel de Champlain establish the first permanent settlement at the site of present-day Québec City.
As it was for the Puritans in New England, the New World seemed to the Roman Catholic Church a call from God to create a model society. But this frontier religion would have much to withstand. As a colonial and missionary faith, it strove to mitigate the perceived wildness of the Indigenous inhabitants as well as the brutality and licentiousness of the unruly profiteering colonists. If the Indigenous tribes were to be converted, the Church believed it needed to present impressively pious colonists as role models. It soon became state and government, managing daily life in villages and trading posts as well as moderating colonial relationships with Indigenous Peoples and with Europe. While thousands of seasonal French workers arrived seeking furs and cod, priests came in droves, just as serious about souls.
Yet New France failed to build as substantial a population base as New England partly because of its climate and partly because its seasonal workers lacked motivation to immigrate permanently. The educated and wealthy came only in the summer, and permanent colonists endured not only harsh winters but the military encroachment of the British and the occasional piracy from the not-yet-independent Americans. In 1758, when British General James Wolfe raided and took control of coastal settlements in Gaspésie, many of the French returned to Europe, leaving the poorest and least-educated with only the Church for guidance. In 1759, Québec City fell, and with the last naval confrontation, the Battle of Restigouche in 1760, the British had opened the way to the conquest of most of North America.
For the Church in Québec (the region that the British designated as Lower Canada from 1791 to 1841), the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the most difficult. From 1763 until 1774, the British attempted to assimilate the remaining French, excluding Catholics from public office and banning the recruitment of priests. British authorities wanted to promote the Church of England and stomp out popery, and only with the beginning of the American Revolution did the British see the benefit of the Church. The threat of French Canadians siding with the American revolutionaries was great, and in part because the Roman Catholic Church opposed democratic ideas, the British Parliament passed the Québec Act of 1774, which gave recognition