I am flying on the speed of my dreams. Heading down the 401 towards the Quebec border, I am on my way to meet my sisters, Lynn and Tracy, for the first time. The saliva in my mouth is thick like motor oil as I sit in the back seat of the car, nervous, practising my smile in the rear-view mirror.
I am on my way to the mystical land of my missing family. Kahnawake, the patch of land that lies beneath the Mercier Bridge, the home of my mother and father and my ancestors. The land of shape-shifters, corn bread and steak, ironworkers and all the legends that came to life in stories and gossip around our kitchen table when I was a kid.
I stare in the rear-view mirror and slowly, silently mouth the words “I am a Mohawk.” I repeat it over and over again like a quiet prayer. Saying it will make it real. A faith I am trying to believe in. The car rolls on.
I am nervous and excited and I have brought the two closest people to me on earth along for the ride. Actually, they are bringing me. I am the guy sitting in the back seat, after all. Thompson is behind the wheel and Madeline is in the passenger seat. These two have stuck by me, pulled me out of the ditch, dusted me off and saved my life with their true loving hearts many times over.
They never lost faith in me. I wrecked the family and they crawled out from the wreckage and hung on tight. Now they’re behind the wheel, steering me down the road on the next ride. They are warriors. They are my heart. Because of them I haven’t been hardened by this life. I don’t have to question who I am. I live every moment with them and for them. They’ve given me the greatest gift. Awareness.
As we turn off the highway and onto the reserve, the world changes. Not in a way that would impress or shock you. It’s not like the trees and the sky change. But inside my chest I can feel the difference, as if I am visiting a life I’ve lived before. A flash of emotion, a shift in the light and the warmth of home.
The reserve is all around us now. There is no turning back. We drive past the golf course, tobacco stores and stands, craft stores and the graveyard into the heart of the town.
I look out between the front seats, out through the windshield, and a fog I’ve been in my entire life begins to lift. I know this place. I dreamt myself here as a kid. Dreams that were fantastic. Dreams that took me to times and places that I knew were real.
I’d cruise the Saint Lawrence Seaway and come swooping down these roads on John Lazare’s back. My grandfather, sturdy and sure of himself, not a word spoken but I could hear him singing as he carried me. I’d climb off his back and walk through the deepest blues and greens of graveyards and step into the black shadows cast by the great bridge. In my dreams I was safe, surrounded by the ghosts of my ancestors.
Still, I’m a Hamilton guy. I spent Christmases in Kahnawake as a kid and watched lacrosse games on the Six Nations reserve but I haven’t really seen how people live on a reserve. I do remember John Lazare. He was an elected chief, an important man, and he lived in a small house and was considered well off. When I was talking on the phone with my half-sister Lynn Beauvais, I had no idea what kind of life she was living. How could I know or assume anything? It was a blind spot in my mirror and that was the problem. For all intents and purposes I am an ignorant white man.
By the time our car pulls into town and hits the centre road, Lynn is on the phone asking where we are, what is taking us so long. She’s already bossing me around, acting like an older sister. I tell her we are on the reserve and heading her way. She tells me to look for the old stone building and that she and Tracy will be sitting on the front porch waiting.
Sure enough, as we round the corner and turn up the church road we can see the house. A massive old building that looks like it has been brought back to its original glory from three hundred years ago. Lynn lives there in the beautiful stone heritage building that was built by the French army in about 1735, well before the Mohawks were ushered onto the land surrounding it known as Kahnawake. It has been the centre of government business and acted as a court house and post office, was the only building with a phone, and it acted as a kind of morgue for the thirty-three men who died in the 1907 Quebec bridge disaster. The place looks like it is filled with spirits and time travellers and my sister is running the whole show.
Thompson pulls onto the paved driveway that leads into a three-car garage. We step out of the car and into a rush of mid-afternoon summer heat. Leaving the air-conditioned car is like stepping out of an oxygen tent. Everything slows down to a crawl. I round the corner of the house and walk towards the front porch, and there are Lynn and Tracy. My sisters. I don’t know which one is which.
They are both about my age with beautiful round faces and eyes full of life and excitement. “Hey little bro.” I recognize the voice from the phone calls. This is Lynn. Her voice is full and direct and has a distinct Kahnawake accent. She stands up out of her chair and greets me. Tracy is smiling bright and wide behind Lynn. She moves to greet me and it almost looks like she is climbing off Lynn’s back to do so.
Tracy I know is more soft spoken and she speaks English without an accent. She is almost laughing at the moment. We all are pretty pleased with ourselves, I must say. I introduce Madeline and Thompson. They are bursting with smiles too. This is one happy bunch of Indians, I think.
Lynn leads us inside the house. It is perfect, immaculate. The front double doors open into a grand entrance hall, all ancient wood from thousand-year-old trees. Wood that came from a land that had not been touched by European hands. It looks like a museum. The staircase leading up to the balcony on the second level must be fifteen feet wide.
The ceilings are twenty feet high and everything is manicured and shining bright. I laugh out loud as I follow Lynn across the 250-year-old hardwood floors. I call out behind her, “Hey Lynn, you’re like the Zsa Zsa Gabor of Kahnawake.”
We all step though the kitchen and out to the back deck. The yard is beautiful. Perfectly landscaped and in the middle is a giant heated salt-water swimming pool. Lynn digs into a cooler and pulls out four beers and a can of Coke for me. We sit around a large round patio table drinking, smoking cigarettes and smiling at one another.
Lynn tells me I look like our dad. My eyes and my brow line are just like his. Then she orders me to show her my feet. All the Beauvais men, it seems, have the same-shaped feet and a bump sticking out of their ankles. I pull my boots off and my socks and put a foot up on the table. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, there it is, that’s the Beauvais foot for sure.”
When she gets excited her voice rises into spikes of falsetto and her early Flatbush roots come out. She immediately sounds like Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. Lynn does all the talking but Tracy does plenty of quiet investigating from across the table. She smiles the entire time. There’s a joy busting out of Tracy.
The conversation slips and dips in and out of Beauvais history. The kids talk about growing up with me and their mom. We all reveal a bit of what we’ve been up to and missing out on for a lifetime, but we speak as if we’ve just been away on a weekend getaway, or a short vacation. “Boy is it good to be back home and you’ll never guess what happened and who was there etc. etc….”
Everything is just as normal as can be.
Lynn does say that she wants to keep my visit a secret from her other brothers and sisters—Thea, Leslie, Ann Marie, Chris and Kyle. Louis Beauvais had six kids with his wife. Then there are me and Tracy who’ve been floating out there in the world. We’re all the products of Louis Beauvais’s good looks and charming personality. Lynn and the family have proof of me and Tracy through DNA results and the good old Beauvais foot test, but are there others? Nobody knows for sure. Our father may have been a big, handsome, lovable playboy, but that isn’t something the family wants to talk about. And they certainly don’t want to be confronted with living proof of it. No siree.
Lynn remembers meeting Tracy when they were still little girls. From time to time, Louis would take Lynn along on his dates at the golf course. It may have been on one of those occasions that Tracy’s mother, Tracy, Louis and Lynn all came face to face. Apparently when Tracy and Lynn made contact again a few years back and Lynn announced it to her siblings, the news did not go over well.
Lynn wants to keep our visit on the downlow. None of the family is to know anything about it. “Sure thing,” I tell her.
Lynn shifts her attention over to Thompson. I can see her staring at the side of his head, squinting like she is looking into the sun. She says out loud, “Oh my god, Thompson, you look just like Tehoriwathe.”
Tehoriwathe is the son of my brother Kyle. If there was any doubt concerning me, any lack of faith they may have had in their “foot test,” any second thoughts about whether I am in fact their brother, their blood, it’s Thompson who wipes all that away.
Now, even though I am meant to be kept under wraps, Lynn just can’t control herself. She needs to see Thompson and Tehoriwathe standing side by side. “Who wants pizza?” She gets on the phone and orders up some pie. She sits back down and says, “Let’s have some fun.” Half an hour later the pizza is delivered by someone who truly could be Thompson’s twin, Tehoriwathe. It seems it is not just our feet that we Beauvais men have in common.
From what I can gather, Lynn was very close with our father. “Our Father who art in heaven,” Lynn loves to joke. She knows how to dish it out, and she knows how to take it. She is the eldest in the family, and that includes Louis’s illegitimate offspring, Tracy and me. The way Lynn talks about our father now, after all these years, there was obviously some blood-on-blood magic that trumped any wrongs they did to each other.
Lynn has the same fondness in her eyes and softness in her voice when she talks about our brothers Christopher and Kyle. The brothers are a couple of lady-killers. Big, strong ironworkers all their lives. Lynn loves to talk about the projects they’re working on. It’s ironwork talk. It’s all about pride and pain and money and the bonding that goes on between workers and families. Lynn speaks the same way generations of women have spoken and the way future generations will speak about the ironworkers.
“Your brother Christopher. He’s on a big job in New York. You ought to see what they’re working on. It’s the same concept as Rockefeller Center. Different buildings, shopping centre, one called the shed,” and she angles her hands in front of her and explains that one building goes like this and the other one opens up over the train tracks and the roof opens and the walls lift and it’s a performing arts centre. “The cultural shed. The Hudson Yards. It’s going to be beautiful. It’s a big job. Right down on the Hudson River in Manhattan. And Kyle is working on this thing they call the beehive. The plans for it just came out last week. It’s going to be amazing. The centrepiece.”
On 9/11, when the World Trade Center came down, my brother Kyle was on the front lines of the rescue and recovery efforts. He was in the first wave of responders to jump into the wreckage looking for survivors and removing remains from what was left of the towers that my uncle Walter and five hundred other Mohawks had built in the sky over Manhattan. Walter had worked ten years on that project, and with great pride had raised the antenna. Kyle walked through Ground Zero, climbing over mountains of twisted iron and steel. The world was on fire, unpredictable, dangerous. He and two hundred Mohawks moved those mountains so the firefighters could get underneath and do their job. Kyle was pulling some wreckage away and came upon a giant piece of steel that he thought was a rocket. It was Uncle Walter’s antenna.
When Kyle finally got a break, he went home to Kahnawake. He washed and cleansed himself with tobacco water because parts of all those people who died there were inside his system. He said that the ritual was part of his responsibility to the people who had died there. Those lost souls are carried on by the Mohawk ironworkers.
Most ironworkers who have given up the game and got themselves into the new/old profitable cigarette business still say they miss “the job.” They don’t miss the travelling but they miss the work. Go ahead and ask one of them, “Do you miss the ironwork?”
The answer comes back a quick, simple and matter-of-fact, “Yup.”
There’s constant talk around my sister’s kitchen about the old days, crimes, characters and misconducts. Sharp minds, spinning wheels, rapid-fire humour, counterpoints, turning corners and bending the truth. The conversation is fantastic. You can drift out of the talk and come back in at any time and still get an earful of action. Small-town chatter. Community talk, everyone knows everybody, this person is related to that person and my cousin and this one and distant relatives and outcasts and arguments back and forth about facts and figures that have packed up, left town and disappeared into the mist over the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
As I walk around the reserve, I come face to face with some of the old-timers who lived and fought through the summer of 1990. It’s not easy to get them to share their secrets from the woods and the front lines. Many used to be in Canadian Army Reserve, and some were Vietnam vets. They didn’t want to see anyone die and pitied some of those young kids that the army had put in the front lines. For the town of Oka it was all over a goddamn golf course. For the Mohawks it was about plowing over graves and digging up the bones of their ancestors. For the Mohawks, it was about survival. That was the whole Oka Crisis. That’s what started it. And the moaning and tears brought on a river of anger, and the anger would bring the SQ (the Quebec provincial police) and the Canadian army and a hatred that had been hidden in plain sight.
The first causality on July 11, 1990, was my nephew Logan, my sister Lynn’s little boy. He was riding his bike with no shoes, and Lynn kept yelling out across her front lawn, “Logan, put your bloody shoes on right now!” No sooner had the words left her mouth than Logan’s toe slipped through the sprocket and right through the chain. He screamed and looked at his foot and saw that his toe was hanging by a thread of skin.
Lynn ran out and wrapped his foot in a towel. Blood soaked though the towel so fast that she wanted to panic, but she kept her cool. There was no time to call an ambulance, so Lynn’s husband, Kenny, put Logan in their car and drove him to the fire station, where they put him in their ambulance and took him to the children’s hospital. Three hours later Logan’s toe was stitched back on, and Kenny and Logan were in a taxi leaving the hospital.
But the taxi would not go anywhere near the reserve. That day, after weeks of playing cat and mouse with the Mohawk warriors, the army had stationed troops right where the smoke stores were, arming them with shields, batons and rifles. The warriors had cut two-by-fours, lined up and attacked the soldiers, chasing them until they reached the end of the reserve. French mobs had gathered and fires were burning and tempers were ready to burst the Saint Lawrence Seaway wide open. So the taxi left Logan and Kenny at the Mercier Bridge.
The bridge was blocked by the angry French mob. Logan was terrified. He was just three years old, and was so scared that he clung on to his father’s neck. Five police officers surrounded the boy and his father, refusing to let the two take the walkway on the Mercier Bridge back home. Kenny moved to step around them, but they blocked his way. Kenny got mad—he was big and tough and didn’t give a shit what happened to him. But Logan hung on to his father’s neck for dear life. Kenny came to his senses, put his anger aside and turned back.
When he looked towards the river, he saw somebody from the town silently signalling to Kenny like “Get in…Get in the boat.” They were trying to get people back home and away from the bridge and had seen Kenny and Logan blocked by the mob.
They were dropped two minutes from their house, and as they approached, Lynn ran to meet them. They got into the house safe, where the radio in the kitchen was reporting on the conflict at the bridge. Lynn brought them in and yelled, “Listen, listen!” She turned up the volume, and just then our father, Louis Beauvais, ran up to the kitchen window and said, “They’re firing, they’re firing on them!” The SQ had lost it.
The impact of the Oka Crisis lived with Logan long after that summer. Lynn told me that they were in a Chateauguay IGA a couple years later, and Logan was sitting in the front of the cart, dangling his legs. Suddenly, he looked around and began yelling out to the people in the store, “Blockade, blockade! Nobody can pass. Blockade, blockade!” Then he broke down crying. My family were trying to get by, trying to keep their heads down. They were at a disadvantage and had become the enemy whether they were women or children. The stares were still cast and the tension was still thick in the air. The entire community suffered, and even though the roads were getting patched up and the tanks had gone home, the community remained broken for a long time. It was a story I didn’t know until the community became mine.
My cousin Carol has arranged for my first visit with Sonny Lazare, and she drives Madeline, Thompson and me the few winding blocks from Lynn’s house over to his. Carol drives a huge Cadillac and needs cushions on the driver’s seat to see over the steering wheel. Meeting Sonny is one of the reasons I’ve made the trip back to Kahnawake. It’s part of the re-entry. Like finding the Manger or the Titanic or the Ark. My greatest mystery solved, and the evidence right here in front of me. He lives alone now in the house he bought off Joe Delille. Sonny got the house and the adjoining pool hall, settled into the corner lot, ran the business and never left. When I say “alone,” I sure don’t mean lonely. Sonny has eight kids, 120 grandchildren and great-grandchildren and counting. The house is always busy, and the daughters in particular look out for their father around the clock. His house is the family place.
I don’t know if Sonny ever saw me as a little boy. I don’t imagine he did. I used to spend Christmases at John Lazare’s house, a few blocks away from Sonny’s, but I was never allowed off the property in case someone recognized me. I was just another big-headed boy, but in Kahnawake I was suspect, a pale Mohawk stranger that my family feared would start talk around town.
Sonny’s front door is the end of my long walk home. A walk I didn’t know I was going to be making. I never knew where I belonged, and as a result I went through life with a question mark above my head. When you’re not sure who you are or where you came from, life is a little more difficult. You’re aware of everyone around you. You’re always the outsider. You keep your fists clenched in your pockets in case the world challenges you or looks at you the wrong way.
The unknown led me down twisted paths, and I found plenty of trouble there. I’d lie awake wondering, and then feel guilty for wondering. I was constantly spinning, looking for ways to calm myself, to slow myself down, always searching for answers that were not out there. I looked for ways to prove I was alive, that I was real, that I belonged. I used sex to be in the here and now, and booze and drugs to wipe everything out again. It was a deadly circle of abuse that I kept going for decades. But I didn’t have to be on this crooked path. It could have been easier.
I thought about all of this as I knocked on Sonny Lazare’s door for the first time. Standing there at the door, I pictured Bunny and George and 162 East 36th Street and Janie and the Hamilton streets I grew up on and all my French and Irish relatives who knew my story and never told me. But everything, the thoughts and regrets and questions about life and who I was, disappear into smoke as the door opens and my cousin Sharon appears in the doorway, smiling. Behind her is Sonny, sitting in his easy chair. He pulls himself out of his chair, tears in his eyes, arms outstretched. I’ve never had this kind of welcome from a family member before. “You were supposed to be raised here where you belong. You are a Mohawk.”
I am the son he was not allowed. He accepts what happened, but still hints that I was taken from him. I was supposed to be his. He was well on his way to filling his house with kids, and his wife, Hazel, agreed that they would raise me. Then she found out that she too was pregnant, with my cousin Sharon, and John Lazare made his trip to scoop me up into his back seat and take me home, but instead came back to Kahnawake empty handed. Bunny and George made a home for me in Hamilton, and that was that.
He’s waited fifty-six years for this moment and is an old man now. So am I. But I’m here. I’m scared and scarred but I’ve survived. I’m alive and lucky as hell.