Cape Breton Tales

by Harry James Smith

"And with that he places a kiss on the forehead of his poor mother, who was letting drop some tears, and walks out of the house without so much as turning his head again; and he marches over to Petit Ingrat, where there was an American fisherman which had put in for some bait, and he says to the captain: 'Will you give me a place?' and the captain says, 'We are just needing another man. Yes, we will give you a place.' So this Tommy, he got aboard, and a little later they put out and went off to the Banks for the fish.

"Well, it was not very long before that Siméon got over his bad wicked rage; and then he was sorry enough for what he had done, especially because there was no longer any son in the house, and that poor Célie must always be grieving herself after him. And you may believe that Siméon got little pity from the neighbors.

"'It is good enough for him,' they would say—'a man like that, who is not decent to his own son.'

"But they were sorry for Célie, most of all when she began to grow thinner and thinner and had a strange look in her eyes that was not entirely of this world. The old man said, 'She will be all right again when that schooner comes back,' and he was always going over to Petit Ingrat to find out if it had returned yet; but you see, of course there would not be any need of bait when the season was finished, and so the schooner did not put in at all; and the autumn came, and went by, and then followed the winter, and still no news, but only waiting and waiting, and a little before Easter that poor Célie went away among the angels. I think her heart was quite broken in two, and it did not seem to her that she needed to stay any longer in this hustling world. And so they buried her in the old cimetière—I saw her grave to-day, next to Siméon's, and this fine new monument is to be for the two of them; but for all these years there has been just a wooden cross there, like the other graves.

"But still no word came of Tommy, and the old Siméon was all alone in the house. Oh, I can remember him well, well, although I was only a young tiny girl then and had not had any sorrow myself. We would see him walking along the Petit Ingrat road, all bent over and trailing one leg a little.

"'Hst!' one of my companions would whisper, 'that is old Siméon, who drove his son from home; and his poor wife is dead with grief. He is going across there to see if a schooner will have come in yet with any news.'

"And that was true. He took this habitude of making a promenade almost every day to Petit Ingrat during that season of the year when the Americans are going down to the fish—là-bas—and if there was a schooner in the harbor, he finds the captain or one of the crew, and he says, 'Is it, m'sieu, for example, that you have seen a boy anywhere named Tommy Leblanc? It is my son—you understand?—a very pretty young boy, with black hair and fine white teeth and a little curly mustache—so—just beginning to sprout.' And he would go on to describe that Tommy, but of course, for one thing they could not understand his French very well, for the Americans, as you know, do not speak that language among themselves; and anyway, you may depend that none of them had ever heard of Tommy Leblanc; and sometimes they would have a little mockery of the old man; and sometimes, on the contrary, they would feel pity, and would say, well, God's name, it was a damage, but they could not tell him anything.

"And then the old man would say, 'Well, if ever you should see him anywhere, will you please tell him that his father is wanting him to come home, if he will be so kind as to do it; because it is very lonesome without him, and the mother is dead.'

"Then after he had said that, he would go back again along the road to the Cape, not speaking to anybody unless they spoke to him first, and trailing one leg after him a little, like one of these horses you see sometimes with a weight tied to a hind foot so that it cannot run away—or at least not very far. That is how I remember old Siméon from the time when I was a little girl—walking there along the road to or from Petit Ingrat. I used to hear people say: 'Ah, my God, how old he is grown all in these few years! He is not the same man—so quiet and so timid'—and others: 'But can one say how it is possible for him to live there all alone like that?'—and someone replied: 'You could not persuade him to live anywhere else, for that is where he has all his memories, both the good and the bad, and what else is left for him now—that, and the crazy idea he has that his Tommy will one day come home again?'

"You see, as the years passed, everybody took the belief that Tommy must be dead, at sea or somewhere, seeing that not one word was heard of him; but of course they guarded themselves well from saying anything like that to poor old Siméon.