Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place Read online

  My mother loved to sunbathe and would lie motionless for hours on a blanket in the hot, weedy sun, her closed eyes covered with two green leaves. We had a pet crow (called Jimmy after the Civil War song refrain “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care”). He was inquisitive and would sidle up to my mother on her towel and carefully remove each leaf. He was reassured that she was not dead when she opened one of her green eyes. When my mother built a stone fireplace in the backyard I was allowed to press my hand into the wet, gritty concrete that had not yet set and the crow walked about in it leaving his prints as well. Years later, as we were moving from 2217 McBride Avenue in Utica, New York, in a car packed to the roof with kids and clothes, my father put Jimmy in a hole-punched cardboard box, and lashed the box to the back bumper. The poor fellow was dead when we stopped for lunch by the side of the road, asphyxiated by exhaust. I never forgave my father for this crime. The misfortunes that befell loved pets were my introduction to tragic and inconsolable loss.

  We moved and moved and moved. Over the years we lived in dozens of houses. A place in Rhode Island had the outline of someone’s arm in the broken sheetrock at the bottom of the stairs. A house in Black Mountain, North Carolina, offered a good view of shade trees where chain gang road crews rested. A place in Maine had beautiful elms whose roots swelled up near the surface and made mowing the lawn difficult. Then the Maine Turnpike went in a quarter of a mile away and almost immediately there was a ghastly accident that brought police, rescue vehicles and the too-late ambulance. An official state cross indicating a death had occurred at this spot went up, a safety warning policy the state of Maine dropped when the proliferation of crosses along the highway gave it a ghoulish appearance.

  A large part of the reason for constantly moving was my father’s obsessive desire to escape his French Canadian heritage and reinvent himself as a New England Yankee, to escape working-class poverty, to achieve financial success, to climb the ladder into the safe middle class. He and his family were victims of the racism that infected the dominant culture of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant New Englanders, who saw immigrants, especially French Canadians from the north, as racially inferior. Less overt now, white racist anxiety persists in that area. I think an important factor in why my father married my mother—they were ill-suited to each other—was my mother’s old New England family, poor but with the superiority of early arrival, just fifteen years behind the Mayflower. They never accepted him, of course—how could they? A son-in-law with the flamboyant middle name of Napoleon! The genealogical scratching around we’ve done has turned up more florid French names in his forebears, such as Dieudonné, Narcisse, Norbot and Ovila, which make George Napoleon sound rather tame. Still, they tolerated him and us and we all pretended to be a family honoring equality and diversity.

  Growing up we knew very little about my father’s family and rarely spent time with them. His mother, Phoebe Brisson Proulx Maloney Carpentieri, married three times: a French Canadian (Proulx), an Irishman (Maloney) and an Italian (Carpentieri) from Napoli who taught my father to make spaghetti sauce—a sauce which I and my sisters all make today, our best, perhaps our only, gift from a hard-to-know father.

  So there were mysteries for us. There was some talk from our father that we were part Indian, but he believed the proof had been in the trunk of his grandmother Exilda (a.k.a. Maggie), which disappeared after her death and never resurfaced. The only evidence was his mother’s smoky skin color and a few imaginative newspaper stories. There were other intriguing stories, such as one about a growth on our grandmother Phoebe’s nose, a voyage across “the river” (the St.-Laurent always imagined) to an Indian settlement where a shaman or medicine man removed the growth in some unspecified manner. Our pleas to our father and to his mother, Phoebe, for details and enlightenment were never satisfied. Anonymity seemed the goal, but these half-stories were fuel on the fire of our longing to know more.

  This attachment to clan ancestors seems to characterize all humans, and the ancient stories told about the departed—embroidered and amplified—were perhaps the rudimentary sources of history and of fiction. Certainly the Romans themselves were keenly reverent of their ancestors, polishing the links to old families, the ideal the Gracchi, founders of Rome in 753 B.C., or even the more ancient Etruscans who lived in central Italy before Rome. When Ötzi, the Neolithic–Copper Age man, was discovered in a melting glacier in the Alps in 1991, his mitochondrial DNA analysis showed he was in a subhaplogroup called K1. (There are three K1 subhaplogroups.) Roughly 8 percent of today’s Europeans also belong to the K1 haplogroup. Many then believed they were descended from Ötzi. Extremely cool to have a five-thousand-year-old ancestor with a stone arrow point in his back. But further DNA testing reports in 2008 showed that Ötzi belonged to a different subhaplogroup, one unknown before the advanced analysis. It is now called “Ötzi’s branch” and apparently this haplogroup—his genetic group—has disappeared from the human genome. It may be extinct or exceedingly rare. Now no one is known to have Ötzi as an ancestor—one of the disappointments of science.

  For me, many years later, an atmosphere of specialness still hovers over the extended maternal family like some rare perfume that nearly four hundred years of New England residence emits. I imagine this aroma compounded of fresh milk, split oak wood, autumnal leaves, snow, muggy swamps, photograph albums and cold ashes.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Yard of Cloth

  In the late 1980s on the day after Thanksgiving my younger sister Roberta and I went to visit our mother in her little apartment complex of housing for the elderly in Bristol, New Hampshire. At the time we both lived in Vermont on the west side of the Connecticut River. The day was mild for late November, heavy overcast, light rain and fog, one of those dark days that New England breeds in autumn. There were deer hunters on the road driving at twenty miles per hour, craning their necks to see into the scraggy woods.

  Roberta and I are close in the sense that we often think and feel in similar ways. At that time we tried to visit our mother, Lois Gill Proulx, once a month. She had been ill for years with bronchiectasis, an uncommon degenerative lung disease which she fought with exercises, diet, medication and willpower. Frequent bouts of pneumonia and colitis attacks lurked as accompanists. Her closest sister, Gloriana (beloved Hikee), had the same miserable disease and in the summer of 2008, my cousin Eleanor Goodenough Milner and I, going through some of my mother’s papers, came upon a poignant and upsetting correspondence between the two sick sisters. The sense of the hopelessly brave front, the running jokes, the closest sisterly bond, a hatred for stupid and condescending doctors—of all the things two people suffering the same illness can say to each other that no one else could understand—overwhelmed us. I can now barely open the box that holds those letters because all the disappointed dreams of these two hungry-for-love women fly in my face.

  On that post-Thanksgiving day Roberta and I drove into the gathering gloom of Bristol. On the corner, a block from our mother’s building, there had once been a wonderful rock shop full of minerals, geodes, bits of agate, amethyst crystals, odd mudstone shapes, slabs of malachite. But the sign was gone and in its place was a drooping banner in the window: decorator fabrics lower than wholesale. Roberta and I both like beads, cloth, yarn, needles.

  “Let’s look on the way back if they’re still open.”

  “Yes.”

  The dinner was pork loin, creamed onions that tasted exactly the same as they had when we were children, sweet potato, applesauce Roberta had made from a neighbor’s apples, swapping him a chicken. Our mother was tired, but in fairly good health and spirits. She had exhausted herself for two days making the dinner. (Guilt! Guilt!) My mother and I each drank a glass of wine.

  Late in the afternoon we left her. The light was fading. A thin mist blurred the small branches of the trees. At the corner we remembered the fabric sale sign. The place was still open. I parked the truck and we went inside.

  There was no one in the shop. No one. P
iles of folded fabric were stacked on long tables, bolts of shimmering brocade leaned against the wall. The shop stank of old minerals, stale cigarette smoke and the scent of wet leaves and rain we brought in with us.

  The bolts of fabric were as awkward as loose walking sticks and slid and fell against each other when we tried to pull any one out. It was difficult to see the patterns without knocking down a dozen of them. As we wrestled with the slippery bolts the door opened and a man came in.

  In some inexplicable way he was repellent. His face was creased and seamed, his black hair combed over a narrow skull. Slack stubbled cheeks, discolored teeth. The bolts of fabric seemed viciously animated. The man began to talk to us in an obsequious, intimate tone of voice. His comments were inane, stupid.

  “I know ladies like to rummage around with cloth.”

  The damn bolts of designer fabrics, probably hijacked, I thought, refused to stay in place. The man asked us where we came from. We evaded, saying simply “Vermont” and “across the river.”

  “Where in Vermont? What town?” He would not give up.

  “Oh, central Vermont, around Montpelier,” I lied.

  Now he insisted we take his business card. The cards were just across the street in his antique shop. No, no, we didn’t want him to bother. We refused. I was suddenly wild to get away from this man. He began to wind clocks, set the hands. I hated him. The fabrics were rich and fine, the prices very low, but it was impossible to make a rational selection with the man talking on and on in his oily way. Snatching up a bolt of fabric without looking at it I said I would take a yard of cloth, try it at home and see if the colors were right. Anything to get away.

  He produced a grimy yardstick from under the counter and a pair of scissors with a broken point. My sister leaned silently over an empty birdcage still encrusted with droppings. With a little flourish, and promising “I’ll give you more than a yard,” the man measured, cut briefly with the scissors, then tore the fabric and folded it into a small square. In the exchange of money his hand—very graceful and long-fingered—touched mine. Fever hot.

  Yet we still could not get away. A barrage of advice to drive carefully, to take care, warnings that it was a bad night, there was fog, the road was slippery followed us down the steps. I thought his persistence extraordinary. Finally, alone on the sidewalk, we told each other that we had had a singular encounter.

  We drove west through the mist and damp. The light was a somber, northern grey, the road blurred with light rain. Fog hung over the Pemigewasset. On the outskirts of town the road widened. We were alone on the highway. My sister was reading a letter. We came into the broad, sweeping curve that follows the river’s course. In front of us, skewed across the empty road, in the smoking-grey silence were two smashed grey cars, pillars of steam rising from each, the road a fine carpet of glass. We stopped. Silence, stillness, all as static as a stage scene. There seemed no one in the terribly smashed cars, all the vehicles’ glass on the road, the metal torn and compressed. A broad red runner of radiator fluid glistened on the wet road. We went to the cars. I could see a slumped figure.

  Other vehicles began to come up behind us, most of them pulling around and continuing on their way. A pickup stopped. Two young men leapt out and began to pull at the farther crashed car’s door.

  “Don’t move them,” I called.

  Their hands withdrew from something, someone. My sister and I were at the nearer car. We saw the humped man, the blood, we saw he was young with thick, light hair, the brilliant red soaking into a blond mustache, something on the seat beside him like a brace, some plastic soda bottles. He moaned. My sister touched his shoulder. His face was grey, his eyes closed. His clothes sparkled with glass. He made a twisting hunch. His legs rattled. My sister’s hand lay lightly on his shoulder.

  Now cars were coming from both directions, swerving and cutting around or pulling over, the people getting out to stare. No police.

  “I’ll go for help,” I called to the young men.

  “The police station!” they yelled back. “Half a mile down the road.”

  “Don’t move, we’ll get help, help is coming,” I said to the injured man. I doubted he heard me. I ran to my truck, looked back. My sister was still with him, her hand on his shoulder. I called to her. She stepped toward me, turned back to the injured man, again stepped toward me, but reluctantly, still looking at him, her hand still outstretched even as she came away from him as though she couldn’t bear to leave him. A few days later we learned he had died from his injuries.

  At the station the dispatcher called for police, ambulances, the Jaws of Life, fire trucks, someone to control traffic. In minutes flashing lights and sirens went by. We did not go back to the scene but headed home by another, longer road, many miles out of our way and clogged with traffic crawling through the thickening fog. I drove slowly and carefully.

  My sister and I both believed the man in the shop had saved our lives with his delaying talk, his cautions. A minute or two earlier and it could have been us wrecked on the curve of the river road. It was a singular and disturbing incident and we both felt its importance.

  That night I telephoned my mother and told her about the accident and about the man in the shop who gave us the creeps but had perhaps saved us.

  “Ah,” she said. There was a note of contemptuous amusement in her voice. “You know what his name is, don’t you, the man in the shop?”

  “No. He wanted to give us his card but I didn’t take it.”

  “His name is Proulx,” she said. In her tone—or did I misinterpret?—was her family’s careful Yankee neutrality toward my father which I had come to see as rejection. This disclosure had the effect of an electric shock. The private questions welled. My sister and I spoke intensely to each other. The silence of our childhood, adulthood, suddenly broken. Who was this man with our name? Who were we? Who were our people? We knew so little. The American experience, the focus on individual achievement, the acquisition of goods and money to prove one’s social value, is built on this sense of loss, this alienation from the warmth of the home culture, isolation from genetic bonds. This separation from one’s tribe creates an inner loneliness that increases as one ages. There is in many people, especially immigrants, a burning need to complete the puzzle, to find the missing pieces. And what did it do to us, growing up as outsiders, as part of no place—we had moved more than twenty times by the time I was fifteen—as part of no people except our mother’s pale-eyed Yankee clan who subtly gave us the sense that we were different and somehow tainted? Now we regret not speaking with the man who shared our name.

  I have moved countless times in my adult life, too. Part of this peripatetic behavior is because Americans are a mobile people, but I also come from a Franco American background, rootless people who have no national identity, who really belong nowhere in the United States. The groups closest to fitting in I suppose are the French in Maine who have chipped out a place, and the French from the Canadian Maritimes who, after the 1755 expulsion from Acadia, went to France where they were not welcomed, then to Louisiana where they became Cajuns (a corruption of the word “Acadians”). The places and habitations where we live have histories, though we rarely know them.

  We slide into houses and apartments others have built and rarely have a clue about what went on there, if the first owner grew an orchard of cherries and pears, how came that bizarre stairway with risers of varied heights, if that large piece of slate in the backyard was a wolf stone, if Indians knew the place and what they did there. I wondered about those things as my family moved and moved again around New England, leaving our hearts in Vermont, on to North Carolina, then again in Maine, but not belonging to any of those places. Jack Kerouac nailed it when he wrote of “that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadians abroad in America.”1 There was one year in my life when I lived in Montréal, and several when I commuted there from Vermont to graduate school, picked up a little joual, became familiar with the flat riverine landscape an
d the shapes of faces. Years later came a weekend in my life when I went to a gathering of Franco American writers on an island in Maine. As I walked into the room I was slammed with the shock of recognition. Here were non-Anglo people, people with familiar lineaments, with long fingers and slender bones, with dark eyes and hair and certain ways of moving and gesturing. Tears came to my eyes and for a little while I felt the curious but lovely sensation of being with the home herd and fantasized moving to Québec, Montréal or the Gaspé or Montmagny. But by then I had been too long in solitude, too anglicized for the joy to last.

  In 1993, plagued by questions of family origins, I engaged Diane L, a genealogical researcher in Connecticut, to see what she could find out about my father’s tangled family and whether or not the Indian connection was real and, if so, what tribe or group. Over the next few years she checked birth and death records, consulted voluminous tomes of records on immigration, baptism, marriages, births, federal census reports, sextons’ reports, corresponded with genealogical societies. For the Canadian end of the research Richard De Gruchy, a Montréal genealogist, discovered relatives whose names I had never heard. I found it all confusing, a total overload of statistical information about too many people. It seemed such a shifting, murky compilation of hundreds of people, that I felt quite overwhelmed as though I had been dropped into Peter Matthiessen’s Lost Man’s River as one of the multitude of estranged, wandering but related characters.

  The branches of my father’s family seemed to boil down to my father’s mother, Phoebe Brisson, daughter of Olivier (Levi) Brisson and Exilda (Maggie) LaBarge, and my father’s father, Peter Ovila Proulx, born in 1886, son of Michel Preault [sic] and wife Melina. New England clerks mangled French names and struggled hopelessly with Québec place names and all of these had multiple variations of spelling. St.-Rémi south of Montréal became St Remal, or St Remic, Canada. It seemed all members of the various family clans married three or four times, all had nicknames as well as “dit” names, all used Americanized forms of their birth names. They had enormous families with many infant deaths, often renaming new babies after those who had died. But gradually some clarity emerged.