Strangers in the House. Candace Savage
father, by adoption, to Diana and an adored grandpa to her two little daughters.
Back in the 1990s, nothing spoke of love like moving in together and getting the kitchen done up. And so one day, after Keith’s sleepovers had morphed imperceptibly into permanent occupancy and our search for a place to call our own had brought us back, again and again, to this very house, we realized that this was it. It was time to call in the contractors. Out went the battered old kitchen cabinets and down came the kitchen walls, choking the room with dust, splinters of lath, and a volcanic outpouring of wood-chip insulation.
As we gazed, aghast, at this scene of destruction, we were surprised to notice bits of flotsam poking out of the wreck, half-buried in crumbled plaster or caught between shards of wood. An old-fashioned button-on shirt collar, badly frayed along the crease. A grubby book cover emblazoned with the figure of a cowboy astride a bucking bronc. A cluster of tattered pages from a cookbook: Boiled Frosting, Brown Frosting, Milk Frosting, Chocolate Frostings I through III. Each item was torn and dirty and must have once been discarded. Why else would they all have ended up among the rubble inside our walls?
But soiled and damaged as these relics were, they were also eloquent. That collar had been abraded by some man’s body. The book, with its cover once firmly affixed, had been held in a child’s hand. The recipes had been fretted loose by a woman’s repeated use. The connection these mementos offered was personal, intimate, filled with mystery. Which unknown young student had completed this painstaking page of calculations, every one of them correct? What woman had spent an afternoon in a home-decorating store downtown and come away with a tally card featuring an exotic lady playing an exotic stringed instrument to an exotic bird? For whom could this secretive valentine have been intended, if not, perhaps, for me?
You cannot guess, I grieve to say,
Who I am; though, come what may—
Every day when you pass by,
For your love, in vain, I sigh.
Indeed, that was the question. Who had left these traces—these echoes of vanished lives—embedded in our house? For the sake of romance, I wanted them to have belonged to Napoleon Blondin, in company with his wife and a houseful of happy kids, but there seemed no way to be sure who had left them behind. After all, a lot of people had lived in this house over a lot of years, and these oddments could have slipped down the cracks in the floorboards or sifted through heating ducts—or something—at any time. So I tucked these enigmatic curiosities away for safekeeping along with Diana’s list and more or less forgot about them.
But every now and then, I’d come across my grubby stash when I was looking for something else, at the back of a drawer or under a pile of books. Once, overtaken by an uncharacteristic zeal for tidiness, I decided that several items, including two photographic negatives, were too damaged and disgusting to keep and rashly threw them away. (“If I’d known then what I know now, I would never have parted with them”: the lament of the pack rat.) On the plus side, I had at least begun to examine the items in my reliquary more attentively and to notice things about them that I’d overlooked before. For example: the books represented in the collection had all been published in the 1910s; an order form, never completed or submitted, had been issued in 1928. (It provided fill-in-the-blanks options for procuring “x” hundreds of feet of Equity Binder Twine from the United Farmers of Canada, Saskatchewan Section.) Even the homework bore a wobbly annotation that dated it precisely to January 15 of the following year. And who had lived in this house in those early days? Napoleon S. Blondin and family.
It would take me a decade to notice the final, confirming piece of evidence, though it had been staring me in the face all along. One of the pieces in my hoard was the lid of a small cardboard box, torn and flattened but still bright as new. Made to hold plasticine (“an educational amusement,” the box proclaimed), it showed two fabulously talented children, both sporting pudding-bowl haircuts and floppy bows under their chins, engaged in fashioning remarkably detailed models, an elephant for him and a cow for her. I must have looked at the picture a dozen times before my eyes focused on the smudged inscription across the elephant-maker’s ear. A round, childish hand had written “Ralph Blondin.”
So it was true. The fragments in the walls had been deposited, however unknowingly, by the first people to live in the house, a family I was beginning to think of as adopted kin. More than a mere theory of storytelling, the house had turned out to be an abandoned archive, a midden of tantalizing clues. Binder twine: did that mean my Napoleon was a farmer? A cheesy detective novel about stock speculation: did he enjoy taking risks? The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: perhaps the woman of the house had been ambitious, on a quest for finer things. The evidence was suggestive but insubstantial, murmured conversations just beyond the range of hearing, fleeting gestures caught by the corner of an eye.
And what was one to make of the ghostly figures who gazed out of the single brittle negative to survive my purge? Held to the light, it showed a group of adults arrayed in front of some kind of machine, a biplane, perhaps, or an old-fashioned automobile. In the center, three women, dressed in the long skirts of another era, stood clustered arm in arm. They were bracketed, to left and right, by two gentlemen, one in a flat cap and open-necked shirt, the other slouching stylishly in a fedora and necktie. Imprisoned in their impenetrable black-is-white world, their hair was bright, their faces dark; their eyes glowed eerily. “You cannot guess, I grieve to say, / Who I am. . .”
And so the Blondins came to be acknowledged as a spectral presence in the house, like shadowy and undemanding guests. It was pleasant to imagine that all the walls we’d left undisturbed (everywhere but the kitchen, that is) still held traces of their time here. Yet it was also possible to ignore them entirely for weeks or months on end and focus on our own preoccupations. And then one day, this easy, come-and-go relationship was shaken by a chance encounter with another ghost, another Napoleon Blondin. This one had been dead even longer.
I WISH I could tell you precisely when this second Napoleon came into view. Until recently, I thought that all I had to do was reach for a certain book on a certain shelf in my office, turn to a left-hand page, and there he’d be, a few lines from the top. But book in hand, there’s no trace of him, and so I cannot say exactly how I first made his acquaintance. What I do know, however, is that my yearning for a settled existence—the desire for deep roots that had called me back to Saskatoon—has kept me on full alert for years. What does it mean to be here? What does it mean to live on the northernmost edge of the great North American plains, only the second generation in my lineage to be born here? What does it mean to be a prairie person?
If there’s an organized course of studies dedicated to pondering these questions, some kind of Prairie Fundamentals 101, I haven’t found it yet. And so my education has been self-directed, episodic, eccentric, and I’ve spent many happy hours rummaging in libraries and archives or consulting with other learners, in person and online. Like a shopper at a flea market, I’m not always sure what I’m looking for, but I sure do know a treasure when I see it.
The second Napoleon Blondin was one of those lucky finds. His name is featured on the Métis Museum website (in a left-hand column, toward the top, so at least I got that much right) among 114 signatories to a petition dated September 2, 1880, and addressed to the governor general of Canada, the very British Marquis of Lorne. The petitioners identified themselves as the “half-breeds of the Lakes Qu’Appelle and environs,” and almost all had French surnames: Desjarlais, Poitras, LaPierre, Blondin. Maybe they’d heard rumors about the plan to hand over huge chunks of the North-West to private interests like John Lake and his determinedly unmerry band. Certainly, the petitioners were keenly aware of the Indian treaties the government had signed in the previous decade with their relatives and friends. “Hello,” the petitioners interjected. “Remember us? We’re still here.”
In the politest possible language, with assurances of “profound respect” and “perfect submission” to the authorities, the members of the small Métis community laid out their concerns. They wanted recognition of their right to hunt, fish, and trade in their traditional territory. They were anxious about the status of their church,