Nikolski

by Nicolas Dickner

  In one corner of the chart, near the legend, was this printed warning:

  THE READINGS TAKEN IN THE COASTAL ZONES BETWEEN SEPT-ÎLES AND BLANC-SABLON DO NOT MEET MODERN STANDARDS. UNMAPPED ROCKS AND SHALLOWS MAY EXIST IN THIS AREA. CAUTION MUST BE EXERCISED WHEN NAVIGATING THESE WATERS.

  And, indeed, the local topography displayed an astonishing number of islands, islets, reefs, peninsulas, mirages, wrecks and buoys, as well as innumerable rocks that surfaced here and there at low tide.

  While the nautical charts of the region showed an abundance of islands, there was at the same time a glaring lack of roads. This might have been put down to an omission intrinsic to nautical charts, whose primary function is to facilitate navigation, but the reason was much less obscure; the maps showed no roads quite simply because there were none. The 138 stopped at Havre-St-Pierre and resurfaced briefly at Pointe-aux-Morts. The stretch between those two points— 350 nautical miles strewn with the aforementioned shallows—was serviced by ship and airplane.

  This dearth of roads produced two significant effects.

  The first was that the people of Tête-à-la-Baleine travelled very little. They were content to practise a seasonal variety of nomadism known as transhumance, which involved spending the summer on Providence Island, a few miles from the coast. This collective migration had in times past made it possible to move closer to the cod shoals during the fishing season. Which raised a question: Now that the cod fishers moored their boats at the Tête-à-la-Baleine municipal wharf, why had no one thought of establishing a summer village of their own on another island farther out, somewhere beyond Providence? After all, there were plenty of islands nearby.

  The second effect—no doubt the most important—was that Joyce, absorbed in her father’s nautical charts, did not set foot outside her village before the age of twelve.

  Joyce’s mother had died a week after giving birth, reportedly because the head of a capelin had got trapped in her bronchial tube. The details of the story were subject to minor variations. At times it was said to have been a cod vertebra in the lungs, or a herring bone in the windpipe—but one thing was beyond dispute: she had been a victim of the sea.

  As Joyce’s father had never wanted to remarry, she remained an orphan and an only child, captain and commander under God, in other words, in charge of preparing the meals, cleaning the house and doing her homework by herself, all of which she performed as a matter of course by the time she was six. Cooking meant boiling or frying the incidental catches her father would bring home. As for the housekeeping, Joyce botched this job shamelessly. Her father looked with forbearance on the abiding mess.

  But the most gruelling of all these chores was putting up with her father’s family, an assortment of inquisitorial aunts, rowdy cousins and boisterous uncles who were apt to drop in at the slightest opportunity. Joyce’s father, a big-hearted man, could not bring himself to turn out his brothers and brothers-in-law; they entered the house as if it were theirs, invited themselves for dinner, railed loudly against the cod quotas and the offshore inspectors, discussed the latest Japanese dietary trends and stayed to watch Hockey Night in Canada. (They were avid fans of Guy Lafleur.)

  Joyce had long understood that the house provided her uncles with a neutral harbour, far from their spouses’ recriminations, at least until one of the wives sallied out to hustle her stray back home, tugging him by the ear or some other bodily protuberance. Actually, this was just about the only reason Joyce’s aunts ever ventured over, which did not prevent them from wagging their heads as they scanned the cluttered dwelling.

  The raucous bunch of cousins made up the most problematical subgroup. They rained down like an infestation of grasshoppers, pulled Joyce’s hair—which from then on she decided to wear short—tripped her up and never missed a chance to have some fun at her expense. They took advantage of her father’s absence to raid the fridge, snatching beer and smoked herring which they would pick apart in front of the television. In order to drive back this wild, not fully housebroken horde, Joyce defended herself with forks and frying pans.

  To offset her father’s invasive family, Joyce relied on the invisible, absent family of her mother, now whittled down to a single member: Grandfather Doucet.

  Lyzandre Doucet lived alone in a ramshackle house erected on the shore a few kilometres from the village. He was rarely seen outside his home, and no one ever paid him a visit.

  Joyce loved everything about her grandfather: his wrinkled hands, the bandana over his left eye, the vile, port-flavoured cigarillos that he smoked all day long and, above all, the thousand amazing stories that he would relate to her endlessly. Every afternoon, after school, she would run to see him. Sitting in the kitchen, he would drink a scalding blend that left rust-coloured rings in his cups and a bitter taste in the throat, that her grandfather called tea.

  It was in this kitchen that Lyzandre Doucet revealed to his granddaughter the family’s great secret.

  Appearances notwithstanding, he assured her, Joyce was the last descendant of a long line of pirates going back all the way to Alonzo and Herménégilde Doucette, also known—depending on the circumstances, the location and the subtleties of the prevailing grammar—as Doucet, Doucett, Douchette, Douchet, Douchez, Douçoit, Duchette, Ducette, Dowcette, Dusett, Ducit or Dousette.

  Born in the harbour of Annapolis Royal in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the two coastal brothers enjoyed a brief but intense career as buccaneers. They sacked the towns of New England, rammed and seized several British vessels and ousted overly acquisitive competitors. They even carried out a risky incursion into Boston harbour in the spring of 1702. The business continued until the day Alonzo died of a common case of indigestion. Herménégilde then retired, thanks to the ample booty the two brothers had stashed away in the fogbound coves of Nova Scotia.

  The Doucet family’s calling as corsairs would have surely faded into the quiet mists of retirement had it not been for the signing in 1713 of the Treaty of Utrecht.

  By ceding Acadia to the English, Louis XIV plunged all the settlers into a delicate situation, especially the Doucet family, whose New England raids had not been forgotten. Sensing the coming storm, Herménégilde’s children anticipated the deportation and spread out in all directions, from the Baie des Chaleurs to the Gulf of Mexico.

  The wandering and the political uncertainty put piracy back on the agenda.

  From north to south there appeared swarms of little buccaneers, like Armand Doucet, Euphédime Doucette, Ezéchias Doucett, Bonaventure Douchet and a number of other variably spelled Doucets whose names have hardly been retained by history. Since one pirate always attracts other pirates, many buccaneers joined the Doucet family: Captain Samuel Hall of Nova Scotia, the Newfoundlander Turk Kelly, as well as Louis-Olivier Gamache, the illustrious freebooter of Ellis Bay. Joyce’s grandfather even claimed that Jean Lafitte, the legendary Louisiana pirate, was a distant cousin of sorts.

  Joyce had never heard of Jean Lafitte, but she was perfectly willing to be impressed.

  A century later, Joyce’s great-great-grandfather and his two eldest sons built the legendary Doucet house near Tête-à-la-Baleine. Hastily assembled out of driftwood, it swayed in the nor’easter with foreboding creaks, leaning seaward like a huge marine mammal suffering vain attempts to keep it ashore. At every equinox, the whole village would place bets on the odds that the frame would finally give up and go out with the tide, but the years passed (Grandfather Doucet would declare, while pounding the nearest post with his fist) and the old building was still standing.

  That house was where every Doucet of Tête-à-la-Baleine had been born and had lived: grandfather and grandmother, great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins both male and female, brothers-in-law and mangy dogs. This branch of the family had stopped practising piracy without, however, having made a profession of fishing. The absence of any precise role had gone a long way to cutting them off from the rest of the population.

  In any case, t
he Doucets lived too far from the village not to be suspect. The town braggarts claimed to visit the rickety house to tumble their girls or to get rum, for, though Grandfather Lyzandre had never rammed and boarded any ship whatsoever, he had done his share of smuggling during Prohibition. No more was needed for the secluded house to be branded a brothel, a dive and a den of eternal damnation.

  Weary of the contempt and the gossip, several members of the family considered leaving the village. The exodus began in June 1960 with the departure of Lyzandre’s youngest son, Jonas Doucet.

  This celebrated uncle, hardly fourteen years of age, had gone upriver to Montreal and signed on with a freighter bound for Madagascar, never to be seen again. His family would occasionally receive illegible postcards dispatched from every port in the world, which Grandfather Lyzandre thumbtacked on the walls of the house. In the depths of winter, when the nor’easter swept across the strand, the colourful stamps from Sumatra or Havana spiced up the Doucets’ daily lives and made them homesick in their very own kitchen.

  Uncle Jonas’s leaving touched off a devastating wave of emigration among the clan. Within a decade, all the Doucets had vanished from Tête-à-la-Baleine. The elders were dead, the young ones had gone away, and soon all that remained were ghosts, old rumours and a wobbly house on the shore with a one-eyed grandfather inside it.

  Joyce was thus the last of the Doucets in the village. A true descendant of her forebears, she had developed a solitary personality that lent her an air of precocious and troubling maturity. She always seemed distracted, immersed in her thoughts.

  What’s more, she suffered from claustrophobia, a natural condition, no doubt, for someone born into a family that was scattered far and wide across North America. She suffocated in tight spaces—the kitchen, the school, the village, her father’s family—and nothing brought her more relief than to lose herself in her Grandfather Lyzandre’s pirate stories, his bitter tea, and the shaky house where she would once again become the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette. Each night she would demand a story about a different pirate. There in that smoky kitchen, all the Doucets of the seven seas filed past, along with the likes of Samuel Bellamy, Edward Teach, Francis Drake, François L’Ollonais, Benjamin Hornigold, Stede Bonnet and William Kidd.

  Joyce wanted to believe these buccaneers had once haunted the environs of Tête-à-la-Baleine, but Grandfather Lyzandre quickly set her straight: these migratory birds preferred the tropical climes. Indeed, most of them had taken up residence under the sun, in the mythical haven of Providence Island.

  Joyce was perplexed by this place name; she spent every summer on Providence Island and had never noticed anything like a pirate’s haven, nothing but old shingled houses peopled with noisy uncles and cousins.

  Lyzandre Doucet explained that there was another island called Providence, located to the north of Hispaniola Island, in the Caribbean. Actually, it was situated in the middle of the Bahamas, but when it came to accuracy one could not ask too much of Grandfather Lyzandre, who had patched together his erudition from old almanacs and commercial calendars.

  Be that as it may, the pirates had turned this island into an impregnable refuge where they feared no one. They occupied a harbour with two openings, easy to defend and too shallow for the hulking navy vessels. No god or master held sway on Providence Island, which from Joyce’s point of view meant no uncles or cousins, and therefore proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that this was an entirely different island.

  Little by little, the ambition of carrying on the family tradition seeped into her mind. It seemed inappropriate to her that the great-great-granddaughter of Herménégilde Doucette should devote her days to gutting cod and doing science homework. She was destined for a pirate’s life, shiver me timbers!

  This brand new vocation was, however, hampered by the lack of a role model; the Doucet family album included not a single freebooting woman, not one nasty, shaft-wielding matriarch whose skirts might have smelled of gunpowder and Jamaican rum. Not even a two-bit piggy-bank thief. Even Grandfather Lyzandre, with all his encyclopedic knowledge, was unable to recall any piratesses. Piracy was strictly a male affair. Joyce saw this as a grave injustice; why couldn’t girls plunder, live dangerously, bury treasure, mock the law and the gallows?

  So there she stayed, prisoner of a family without fame, a village without roads, a gender without options, a time without hope. Standing on the shore of Providence Island, gripping her binoculars, she watched the freighters sail through the channel. Their cargo was no longer the gold and silver of the East Indies, but wheat, crude oil, and endless rolls of paper on their way to New York, where they would serve to print thousands of kilometres of bad news.

  If Herménégilde Doucette had been around, he would have died of neurasthenia within forty-eight hours.

  Tête-à-la-Baleine had only an elementary school, so every September about fifteen teenagers went off to the high schools of Havre-St-Pierre, Sept-Îles or Blanc-Sablon. Their younger siblings, left behind, anxiously and impatiently contemplated the future.

  That morning, a boy had just aroused a wave of admiration when he declared he would fly a helicopter, like his uncle Jacques. Another upped the ante by announcing that he would become the chief engineer on the icebreaker Des Groseilliers. A third would be a something-vaguely-mechanical-engineer of bridges and motors—like, you know … an engineer!

  Joyce rarely took part in the discussions. No questions were ever put to this odd little cousin, who, truth to tell, went for the most part unnoticed. That morning, however, moved by a sudden surge of enthusiasm, she was careless enough to open her mouth:

  “I’m going to be a pirate!”

  Her words were greeted with dumbfounded silence. They all turned toward Joyce, who met their gazes without flinching. She often provoked this sort of astonishment, due, on one hand, to the discrepancy between her slight appearance and her self-assurance, and on the other hand, to her propensity for uttering ideas so bizarre, so out of touch with reality, that one wondered where on earth she might come from. At any rate, surely not from Tête-à-la-Baleine.

  One of her cousins, still brooding over some whacks he’d received from a frying pan, did not miss the chance to call her a bearded lady. Another cousin objected that she was too scrawny to be a pirate.

  “To be a pirate, you mainly have to be a guy,” her eldest cousin ruled authoritatively. “That’s why your mother abandoned you. She wanted a boy.”

  “My mother is dead!” Joyce snarled, grabbing her cousin by the collar.

  “Your mother’s not dead. She ran away! She’s living in New York.”

  “No, Toronto!” another cousin chimed in.

  “Vancouver!”

  “Chicago!”

  Bombarded on all sides, Joyce wavered. At this point, they were told recess was over, and the group moved toward the door. After a moment of hesitation, she swerved away in the opposite direction. Feeling they might have said too much, the boys watched her head toward the cemetery.

  “Anyway,” one of them muttered, “pirates don’t exist anymore.”

  Joyce had never gone to see her mother’s grave.

  The choking on the head of a capelin seemed to her an indisputable fact. All the same, though, she preferred not to talk about it. That spectacular asphyxiation was part of the family mythology, made up of distinguished lives and exotic fatalities. What good was a flesh-and-blood mother, aside from dispensing household chores and admonishments? Joyce preferred an invisible, legendary mother, whose image melded with those of Herménégilde Doucette, Uncle Jonas’s postcards and Providence Island.

  She went around the cemetery reading every epitaph.

  She confirmed what her grandfather had told her: a number of Doucets had been buried there, most of them before 1970. But she found not a single tombstone bearing her mother’s given name. This absence was not a good omen.

  On leaving the graveyard, she veered off toward the strand.

  When sh
e entered the shaky house, Lyzandre Doucet had just placed a steaming pot of tea on the table, as if he had been expecting his granddaughter. That day, however, she had no wish to discuss distant ancestors or seventeenth-century buccaneers; she demanded to know the truth about her mother.

  Lyzandre Doucet listened patiently to his granddaughter but declined to answer her many questions. He was familiar with her fiery personality and was afraid that, on learning the truth, she would feel responsible for events beyond her grasp. Some children are prone to bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders.

  “But Grampa,” she insisted, “how long am I going to be able to stand up to my cousins without even a gravestone to point to?”

  After half an hour of this torment, Lyzandre Doucet finally confessed that the capelin-head story was a smokescreen for a scandal that no one had ever dared reveal to her: her mother had acted just like the rest of the Doucet family. She had gone away a few months after Joyce was born, with no warning or proper explanation. She had boarded a westbound ship, but no one was aware of her exact destination. Some said it was Montreal, or even the United States.

  Joyce drank her tea without saying a word. This disclosure muddled the situation a great deal. How could she be certain of what had really happened? There was no point in questioning those around her. The answer was no longer to be found in Tête-à-la-Baleine.

  Frowning, Joyce mulled over the annoying absence of roads on her father’s nautical charts.

  Five years later, Grandfather Lyzandre, the last Doucet of Tête-à-la-Baleine, passed away, carried off by a fit of coughing. It would be the second (and last) time Joyce paid a visit to the village cemetery.

  She did not seem to be greatly affected by Lyzandre’s death, and continued to go to the house by the shore. Each afternoon she settled herself by the table—at the exact spot where she had found her grandfather’s body calmly seated before his teapot— and looked at Uncle Jonas’s postcards tacked up on the kitchen walls. No one had had the nerve to disturb the contents of the house; it was as though all of its inhabitants had been cut down by the plague. While sifting through the jumble of family objects, Joyce salvaged her own inheritance: an antique sailor’s duffel bag that had no doubt belonged to her grandfather’s grandfather.