The Boulder cont...

Over the course of twenty years, he had built many miles of logging roads. This had entailed removing a myriad of obstacles under sometimes primitive conditions, grading the roads so they would not turn into quagmires during spring thaws or under the autumn rains; it had involved building bridges to cross impassable streams.

“Brains, not brawn,” he kept thinking.

Now, when Dad set himself a task, he was what grade one teachers call “determined” on report cards. He had already figured it would cost him a few thousand dollars to have a truck with the necessary equipment and manpower come all the way out there and get rid of the nuisance. He wasn’t tight with money but, not having had any to spare until a few years before, he had learned from a very early age not to throw it away. The hiring of fancy machines seemed to him, in this circumstance, to be sheer waste. Dad believed in fate. He believed that everything has a reason for being. That boulder was there for a reason, and he would someday find out what that reason was.

Dad had started thinking about fate, and believing in it one day when his younger brother, who had become the priest in the family, had pointed out to him that, with his intelligence, he could have had a university degree. “You could have become an engineer, a lawyer, anything you wanted.”

And when Dad, the handsome six foot lad with the deep blue eyes and muscles like a Percheron, pictured himself the well-fed dog in La Fontaine’s fable, spending his life indentured to a high-paying job, chained to a desk, never being able to smell the pines, to pick blueberries on the job, to leave snowshoe prints in the virgin snow, he had remembered something he thought he had buried deep in the past. He had remembered bald old Brother Lapointe at the college and how he had made him sit on his lap in his office with the door closed and how uncomfortable he had felt; he had remembered how afraid he had been and how he had not known what to do or say, and why he had run away from the college that night. That had been the end of his school days. He was ten years old. At the time, that was how those things were dealt with. You didn’t talk about it; you just went on to something else. Dad’s parents were illiterate and poor. At the age of ten, my father had started earning his own living. But as far as he was concerned now, he needed nothing more than to hear the early morning chatter of the chickadees to know that Destiny in the guise of slimy old Brother Lapointe, had played a marvellous trick on him.

It was a glorious day. Dad was coming back from trimming some of the low branches in the underbrush, working on the winding paths he had been clearing to make his walks more pleasant. Ti-Noir started barking excitedly and running towards the road where a car was cautiously making its way up the hill.

“Take it easy, Ti-Noir.” Dad shouted, and he waited curiously to see who would be coming up now, because this was his private bit of road and he wasn’t expecting anyone.