Grandpère Read Online Free

He laughed, and Clementine would not even look at me. She told me after that I should have asked her first. But she would have said yes anyway, she said. That winter we worked on a house for us. We made it wooden, just sixteen feet wide and twenty feet long, but it seemed like a castle to us. We were married by the Catholic priest even though we didn’t attend the regular services. Louisa insisted, and we went along just to make her happy.
    “The next years were very good. There was work around the Fort, and I made friends with some white men. Louisa’s father played fiddle, and how they all loved to dance! We rolled up the furs, and they danced on the wooden floors. They took turns dancing, one by one and sometimes two at a time, keeping time to the fiddle. I never could get the hang of that fiddle, but I could keep rhythm on the drums.
    “One of my white friends was named Sven. He had golden hair and bright blue eyes and a real sense of fun. He liked to drink whisky and get roaring drunk, as he called it. The first few times, I drank too much and threw up, but then I could drink till my memory of things was hazy. I drank a lot when our first boy was young, but I still did my work in the day. Clementine spoke to me about it twice, but I didn’t listen. Then one morning after a wild party, I woke up at my friend’s house, and I was sleeping with another woman. I couldn’t remember if we had sex or not. I was so ashamed. I crept out of the furs and started home. I was just about to our house when I saw our door open and my Clementine kissing on my friend Sven, who was leaving.
    “I was enraged. I could not speak to them, so I crept out of sight and kept walking till I was deep in the woods. Then I lay down and cried like a baby. I stayed there for two weeks, arguing with myself. Who was to blame? My Clementine? Did I not just wake up in the arms of another woman who I cared nothing for? My friend Sven? Maybe, for he saw opportunity in the arms of a lonely woman. Me? Yes. I had been drinking instead of paying attention to what mattered most to me, my Clementine, our son and our life together.
    “Finally, when I had it all straight, I went home. First I stopped and told Sven he was no longer my friend, that we were enemies from that day on, and that if I saw him, I would try to kill him. I never saw him again. I went home, and no words passed between Clementine and me about anything for some time. Ever since, though, I’ve never been drunk. I won’t say I never had another drink, but something in me would make me stop.
    “I stayed home a lot that winter, and Clementine and I learned to love each other more. The following year your mother was born.”
    His voice comes from deep inside him, the words booming around the room, as I strive to keep up with his story in my peculiar shorthand. It takes a while for my head to absorb what the words mean. My mother was born the following year? My blue-eyed mother, impossible in her dark-eyed family? My mother, who was always teased about being a throwback to some unknown Scottish ancestor? Is Grandpère telling me that he was not my blood? That my blood grandfather was some blond man named Sven?
    I can’t speak. I can hardly think. I just look at him. My thoughts are a jumble. I think of the family tree I treasure, with all the names of the ancestors hanging from the branches. Now in my mind’s eye a broken branch stretches rough and jagged above the canopy.
    He looks steadily at me. He answers my unspoken questions. “I’ll never know. Maybe she was a throwback. I know I loved her more than the rest. She was a sunshine girl, my Annie, always smiling and dancing. She never lost that. But my story today was to tell about drinking. It is one of the bad things in this world. Days and years can go by in a haze. Some of the young men did not have as much to live for as I did. My cousin spent his whole life in a bottle, and his only reward was to die young with no pride and no