Nikolski Read Free Page B

amendments to the Indian Act seventeen years later, Sarah could have claimed her Indian status. But she never did go through the required process; she hadgotten so used to the road that enclosing herself in a reservation was unthinkable.
    Anyway, she liked to reiterate, she would never let a bunch of civil servants decide whether or not she was Indian. True, her family tree did include a few French-speaking offshoots, but anywhere beyond three generations back there were only old Indian nomads, forced by treaty to settle down, then confined to countless reservations with exotic names like Sakimay, Peepeekisis, Okanese, Poor Man, Star Blanket, Little Black Bear, Standing Buffalo, Muscowpetung, Day Star or Assiniboine.
    A half-dozen of these elders still haunted the trailer, seated for all eternity at the star-studded Formica-top kitchen table. These serene, speechless ghosts would watch the landscape roll by, and wonder where the hell all the buffalo had gone.
    Noah’s father, for his part, hailed from the distant shores of the Atlantic. He came from an Acadian family of the Beaubassin area, headstrong settlers whom the British had deported to the four corners of the American colonies: Massachusetts, Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania or Virginia.
    Noah enjoyed the contrast between the two branches of his genealogy, the paradox of being the descendant of both the reservations and a deportation. His enthusiasm, however, was based on a misperception, because his ancestors had not in fact beendeported. Like many Acadians, they had absconded a short while before the
Grand Dérangement
to seek refuge in Tête-à-la-Baleine, an isolated village on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, past the reach of any road.
    It was this secluded place that, two centuries later, would witness the birth of Noah’s father, Jonas Doucet.
    He was the seventh offspring of a bountiful family: eight brothers, seven sisters, five cousins, two uncles, an aunt, a pair of grandparents—in total, three generations of Doucets crammed together in a tiny cabin. He had been baptized Jonas, a stroke of luck, as the biblical repertory might have inspired names with a less agreeable ring, like Elijah, Ahab or Ishmael.
    You grew up quickly in that lost corner of the continent, and at fourteen Jonas was already slinking about in the port of Montreal, some eight hundred nautical miles upstream from his native village. He hired onto a wheat freighter bound for Cuba, with the round trip scheduled to take less than three weeks. But Jonas changed ships in the port of Havana and hopped aboard a cargo leaving for Trinidad. A third cargo took him to Cyprus. From Cyprus he crossed the Suez Canal headed for Borneo, and from there he went on to Australia.
    Sailing from one port of call to the next, Jonas rounded the globe a dozen times. As the harbours came and went, he moved up the ranks, from the kitchen to the engine room, then from the engines to the radio.
    After a few years as assistant, he earned his licence and became a full-fledged radio operator.
    Jonas enjoyed this curious profession halfway between electronics and shamanism, where the operator conversed with the upper atmosphere using what, for the uninitiated, was an obscure rhythmic language. Taking on the shaman’s role did, however, involve certain hazards; the old sparks—those who stayed at the switch for too many years—often suffered from an irreversible atrophy of the vocal cords. They could be seen mouldering in portside taverns, looking like jaded griots, incapable of communicating other than by tapping out bursts of Morse on their beer mugs.
    That prospect gave Jonas pause, and he decided to settle down on terra firma.
    He glanced around nervously as he stepped ashore in the port of Montreal, ten years after his departure. During his absence, Quebec had been shaken in quick succession by the death of Premier Maurice Duplessis, the FLQ Crisis, the modernization of Montreal, Expo 67 and the