Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
start by acquiring farmland, establishing a successful stone quarry, and engaging in endless litigations with their business associates. Jeanne took a leading role in all these endeavors while at the same time producing a brood of eighteen children. Apart from one who died as an infant, all the others (even the bonus set of triplets) survived to adulthood and produced a grand total of 195 grandchildren. That’s a lot of birthdays to remember. And so things continued through successive generations of Pierres and Simons, Marie-Annes and Marie-Jeannes.
By the early 1800s, Clara’s branch of the family had made its way to the westernmost reaches of French Canada, to settle in the very same parish as the Sureau dit Blondins. It was there that Clara’s great-grandmother Josette Parent gained such a reputation for clairvoyance that people began to seek her out to have their fortunes told. Perhaps she alone foresaw the way in which the two families were fated to become intertwined, for when the push came to expand from Québec into northern Ontario in the 1850s, both families answered the call. In this new setting, Josette offered her prognostications to a broader clientele with the assistance of a niece, who provided translation from French to English.
More to the point of our story, Ontario was also the place where the connection between the Blondins and Parents was first sanctified, through the marriage of Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin’s cousin Rose Anna to Josette Parent’s grandson George. The wedding took place in Tiny Township, Simcoe County, Ontario, in 1897. Rose Anna and George’s eldest daughter, Clarissa Marie, was born there the following year.
“N. S. and Clara were related, you know,” Lorena says, as I hand the photos to her and watch as she snaps the pages back into place. “But I expect you already know that. Second cousins.”
I nod—yes, I did know they were related. I’m not surprised, because marriages between relatives were common among people who lived in close communities; my Sherk great-grandparents had been “kissing cousins,” too. But I don’t let on that Lorena is mistaken about her grandparents’ degree of kinship. Napoléon and Clara weren’t second cousins; they were first cousins once removed.
Still, it’s not my place to sour the moment with my superior expertise. So instead of trying to score a point, I spread out my own small stash of treasures for Lorena and Fran to peruse: the torn pages, the ragged collar (not entirely unlike the one constricting Napoléon’s neck in his portrait), the flattened box inscribed with their father, Ralph’s, childish script. As soiled and broken as these objects are, the sisters pick them up one by one, turn them over, pass them from hand to hand. It’s no small thing to be in touch with the cherished dead.
And there’s also my one surviving photograph to consider, the crumpled negative. By now, I’ve realized that, given the miracles of modern technology, I can scan and print the image without difficulty. As a result, the figures that previously looked like a troupe of zombies have resolved into a line of five normal human beings dressed in old-fashioned clothes (ankle-length dresses for the ladies, wide lapels and hats for the gents), standing in front of a turn-of-the-century car (acetylene-gas headlights, cloth top held up by struts). In the background, beyond the automobile, screened by scrubby trees, a body of water catches the glint of midsummer sunshine.
My gaze sweeps across the line of faces, some of which are too blurred and damaged to read, and settles on the two figures on the right-hand side of the image, a round-faced woman with a steady gaze and a man with a strong nose, his hands plunged deep into the pockets of his trousers. “What do you think?” I ask my guests. “See anyone you know?”
The sisters take their time studying the photograph, but in the end, they both shake their heads. “I’m not sure,” Lorena says. “Maybe try Uncle Chick? He might be able to help.”
“Uncle Chick?”
She laughs. “Sorry. Uncle Charles. I don’t know why we’ve always called him that.” (What a family for pseudonyms these Blondins are turning out to be.)
“Do you think, maybe, he’d—”
“I can ask.” The man is in his eighties, I remind myself, and there is absolutely no reason for him to let me in. Napoléon and Clara’s youngest son. Someone who grew up in their inner circle, a person who’d heard their stories from their own lips. As unlikely as it seems that he will say yes, I can’t help hoping.
TOO SOON, IT is time for the sisters to pack up and head for home. As we say our goodbyes, Fran reaches into her purse and pulls out a small cloth bag. Inside are two porcelain medallions, which, she tells me, are of her own design and making. Would I like one of them?
“She’s the artist in the family,” Lorena says. “We’re very proud of her.”
How could I refuse, not that I want to, of course. As I consider the offerings in Fran’s outstretched palms, the choice makes itself, and my eyes settle on a white disc overwritten with flourishes of black. Three women are dancing a wild fandango across the face of the moon. It’s only much later that I will realize what I have been given. More than a hostess gift. More than a token of acceptance, nosy parker that I am. More than an expression of Fran’s own redheaded persona. What I have in my hand is a memento of Clara, great-granddaughter of Josette, descendant of Jeanne Badeau, a spirited woman with a mind of her own.
AS MUCH AS I’ve enjoyed meeting the Blondin sisters, I have to admit that the visit has left me a little bruised. Before they arrived, I’d felt quite smug about how much I knew, all the precious scraps of information that I’d pulled out of the woodwork, both figurative and literal. (And of course, I was also the go-to person on “first cousins once removed.”) But Lorena, in particular, has made me see how much I still had to learn. The characters I’d been pursuing through my research were as two-dimensional as stickmen, mere names and dates on the page. And even at that beginners’ level of understanding, I hadn’t always succeeded in getting things straight. Unless I wanted to embarrass myself in front of Uncle Chick, I was going to have to do a lot more homework.
For instance, one of the pictures in Lorena’s album was an almost unreadable portrait of a bearded man with a beekeeper’s veil drawn over his head, manhandling a large wooden hive. “Cléophas,” she’d said. “He was N. S.’s father. You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“This is the only photo we have of him, but I think he must have been quite a character. You saw where he’d listed himself on the census as a ‘free-thinker’?”
Um, no, I’d missed that. Just as I’d missed any and all mention of his third wife, Philomène, who died after the family came west and was buried in the cemetery at the small town of Harris, Saskatchewan. And while I knew that the Blondins had homesteaded in that district and that later Napoléon had run a store in town, I didn’t know anything about the time his business had burned down. No, I hadn’t observed the shocking omission on his marriage certificate—the gaping blank space where his mother’s name should have appeared. No, I hadn’t noticed the almost-twenty-year difference in ages that separated him from Clara.
The lesson was painfully clear. If I hoped to come close to understanding what had befallen this deeply rooted French-Canadian family when it was transplanted to the west, I was going to have to dial up my attention to detail. And even then, even on full alert, I could easily misread the clues. I’d always assumed, for example, that people like the Blondins who have a coherent ethnic identity would be proud of who they were. This is partly because my own mixed European background makes me something of a mutt. (As a child, when I’d ask my mom about our ethnicity, she’d reply casually, “You’re a little bit of this and that, dear. Heinz 57, really.”) So it seemed to me that the Blondins, who had spoken and sung and, yes, shouted at each other in French since the beginning of time, would be proud of their heritage and on guard to defend it. Whether Québec French or Métis French, they would have loved their language. But no. This had not been the case, not for Clara.
“That’s what my dad said,” Lorena