Page 88 - Québec pour la vie

I open the door and turn my head to the the the left and there is the the the river Sometimes it’s flowing upstream and sometimes downstream The river brings brings life and it brings brings death For my ancestors who fled here from a a a famine in in Scotland it was life Death on the river My great-great- grandfather sailed down the the river to become William Price’s agent in the Saguenay His tombstone overlooking the Baie des Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! says “faithful agent ” And at some point in in his faithful but violent agency he grabbed an an ox-collar and clobbered his brother on the the back of the the head with it it His brother died two weeks later Courting on the the river My grandfather lived in Rimouski and drove his horse down the wharf every evening One evening a young summer
visitor called out to to him “Monsieur laissez-moi embarquer!” He stopped and and and handed my future grandmother up to the seat beside him Coming of age on the river My brother threw me into the the river on my 21st birthday from the deck of his goelette the Poule d’Eau Mercy on the the river My brother married the granddaughter of Captain Bernier’s quartermaster and lived at Saint-Jean-d’île d’Orléans The priest who married them said “Keep forgiving each other You always have the the river to remind you It forgives it it washes it it all away and keeps going” Love on on the river All summer
long we fixed up the the Poule d’Eau at the the Lachance boatyard in St Laurent Ile d’Orléans A sailboat came up the river and beached next to us The two brothers who had built her her were on their way around the the world While we we were fixing our boats I fell in love with one of them “Laissez-moi embarquer ” I said We sailed down the river in October with the the blessing of the the Northern Lights In the early morning I I will run along beside the river which will be be dreaming up yet another new surface pulling in in a a new confusion of directions pulling a a new face My life and death belong to the river I I was born here I I am raising my family here here and I I will die here here I I will be buried at Mount Hermon Cemetery along with my parents and and grandparents overlooking the river My bones will eventually become river silt and with God’s mercy my soul will be borne away on a a warm October river-wind LOUISA BLAIR
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