Ashes in the Grain

A fictional vignette—that tells the story of my family’s Métis identity disappearing not by accident, but by necessity.

By the time Louis Riel’s body dropped at the gallows in 1885, the message had been made clear.

Not just to the West, where he’d fought and bled and stood trial for a people asking to live on their own terms. But to the East too—to the quiet Métis families still holding on in Quebec and Ontario, in mission towns and fur trade corridors, in places like Oka, St-Benoît, and St-André-d’Argenteuil. Places where French and Indigenous bloodlines had long braided together. Where names like Ménard and Couc and Roy and Gauthier had built a life from paddles and pelts, from language and land.

One of them was Paul Ménard, born in 1770, the last of his line to be called “Métis” in a church record. He married in Oka in 1794, and the priest wrote it plainly beside his name: Métis. No need for a registry then. No committee. Just recognition.

But a few generations later, Paul’s great-grandson would be in Ottawa, illiterate and working the roads, known only as a labourer. His signature was an X.

For my family, the word “Métis” no longer followed us in official records.

The culture, the language, the pride—it had gone quiet.

Not because it was lost.

Because it was safer that way.

Oka, 1794 – Mission of Kanesatà:ke

The coat didn’t fit.

That was Paul Ménard’s first thought as he stood outside the chapel, freezing his arse off and trying not to look like someone who deeply regretted every decision that led to this moment—including, but not limited to, borrowing his cousin’s too-short formal coat, showing up sober, and agreeing to get married in a stone church in February.

He adjusted the sabre belt slung across his chest. It looked impressive, sure, but it hadn’t seen actual use since he’d fallen in a beaver trap five years ago and sliced his own boot trying to get out. Still, it made him feel important. Or at least harder to dismiss.

The village of Oka slumbered under a thick layer of snow and silent judgment. Chickens muttered irritably beneath a raised plank house. Smoke curled from the blacksmith’s chimney like a sigh. Somewhere down the lane, an old Mohawk man hawked phlegm into the snow with enough disdain to curdle milk.

Paul shuffled in place, breath clouding in the air. His hands were cracked. His hair could use a compromise. His eyebrows had developed a life of their own—each one now resembled a squirrel auditioning for a lead role in a tragic romance about facial overgrowth.

“Paul,” came a voice behind him, smooth and unimpressed.

He turned.

Félicité Couvrette stood like the goddess of restrained exasperation, wrapped in a charcoal shawl, eyes level and unamused. She was small, quiet, and exactly the kind of woman who could keep a household running while casually deflating the male ego with a well-timed silence.

“You look like spring in the middle of a snowstorm,” Paul offered, knowing full well she’d hate it.

She stared.

“You look like home,” he corrected.

Her expression softened—just a little.

“You look like a man who rolled out from under the woodpile.”

Paul gave a half-grin.

“Wind got hold of me, I didn’t argue. Figured I’d show up like I came off the river.”

She looked him over—coat, boots, that mess of a head.

“You could’ve used a comb. Or a hat. Or some sense.”

“Got just enough of all three,” he said, offering his arm.

She didn’t take it right away. Just gave him that look—the one that said she’d already made up her mind, probably weeks ago—and then hooked her hand through his elbow like it was nothing.

Inside, the chapel was a cathedral only in theory and pine scent. The walls were damp. The benches groaned like elders with opinions. A crucifix hung slightly crooked over the altar, as if even Christ had second thoughts about this particular union.

The Sulpician priest, whose shoulders sloped like an apology, squinted at them over his spectacles.

“Name?” the priest asked, already dipping his quill.

Paul squared his shoulders. “Paul Ménard.”

The priest didn’t look up. “Father’s name?”

“Jean-Baptiste Ménard. Fur trader.”

That made the priest pause. He looked up, eyes narrowing with something that wasn’t quite disapproval—but wasn’t far off.

“And your… origin?” he asked.

It wasn’t a neutral question.

Paul gave a short breath. “Métis.”

The priest didn’t answer right away.

Paul added, quieter now—measured, but firm:

“My grandfather traded for France. My father paddled through more lands than this parish will ever touch. I know who I am. Doesn’t matter if your book does.”

The priest scratched something in the margin—Paul couldn’t see what. Possibly a mark. Possibly a warning. Possibly nothing at all.

“And you?” the priest said, shifting to Félicité.

“Félicité Couvrette,” she said.

“You live within the mission walls?”

“Near enough to hear what’s said behind them.”

The priest sniffed. That was enough from her.

He wrote the final line slowly, like each word had to be negotiated.

Paul Ménard dit Montour (Métis) & Félicité Couvrette.

Paul watched the ink settle.

It wasn’t pride exactly, what stirred in him. It was older than that.

The ceremony took nine minutes, give or take the priest’s deliberate sighs and long pauses, as though each vowel might damn him personally. Paul said the right words in the right order and managed not to wince when the priest added “Montour” next to his name.

Then it was done.

Félicité had his hand and was pulling him toward the door like they were escaping something. And maybe they were.

Outside, the wind caught him square in the chest, cold and sharp, same as it had always been in this place. Snow drifted down again—half blessing, half warning.

“You didn’t faint,” she said, glancing at him sideways, lips twitching like maybe she’d smile if she weren’t too proud to.

“I’ll have you know I was holding steady,” he muttered. “With dignity.”

“You were pale.”

“The priest was pale.”

“He was pale before you started talking.”

They made it past the chapel steps, boots creaking against hard-packed snow. The orchard sat quiet in the distance, the trees bare and stubborn, just like everyone in this village.

They didn’t speak until they reached the edge of the water, where the land fell into the frozen curve of the river. Paul looked out across it. Wide and quiet, holding stories under the ice.

Félicité stood beside him, arms crossed tight over her shawl. She was always wrapped like that, neat and calm, like a woman who’d seen the world change too many times to trust warmth would last. Her hair was dark and tied back with a strip of cloth that used to be her mother’s. Her eyes were hard to read unless she was angry—and even then, you didn’t always get the full story.

Paul loved that about her. He loved a lot of things about her. But what he loved most was the way she never once asked him to be someone else.

“I didn’t like the way he looked at you,” she said softly, still watching the river. “About being Métis.”

Paul looked over the water. “I know.”

“He’ll write it down. He’ll remember.”

“Good.”

She glanced at him now. Not angry. Just… wary.

“It’s different now,” she said. “Not like it was when our parents were young.”

He knew that too. The trade was changing. The British wanted land, not guides. The Hudson’s Bay men were tightening their hold, and nobody needed an interpreter when they came with guns and papers and priests who already thought they knew God better than you.

Paul used to hear stories of his grandfather—how he’d paddled blind from Michilimackinac to Trois-Rivières and still made it on time. How he could trade with the Anishinaabe and then sing psalms in Latin by sundown. Paul hadn’t inherited that gift. What he got instead was a fading name, an absent father, and a mother who died before he turned fifteen.

He’d left the trading post not because he was done with that life—but because that life was done with him. Too many mouths and not enough pemmican. Too many white men in wool coats asking for papers and deeds.

So now here he was, standing in snow up to his ankles beside a woman who said yes anyway.

He turned to her. “I don’t want to start this by pretending.”

She didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.

Paul took her hand—warm and dry, strong like knotted birch—and brought it to his mouth. Just pressed his lips against the back of it. A kiss, if you could call it that. Maybe just a promise in the shape of one.

Then he pulled her close and kissed her properly, there at the river’s edge, snow in her hair and his heart full of something sharp and unnameable.

“So,” he said quietly. “We’re married.”

“We are.”

“Now, what can I do for you?”

She looked up at him. The wind caught her shawl, and she didn’t flinch.

“Now,” she said, “we plant a garden. And you build me a chicken coop that doesn’t lean like a drunk voyageur.”

He huffed out a laugh, but it caught in his throat.

It wasn’t about the garden. It was about staying. About staking out a life on ground that didn’t want them, in a world that kept redrawing lines they were never invited to cross.

He nodded.

“Alright,” he said. “But don’t expect the coop to be pretty.”

“I expect it to stand.”

That, he could do.

Oka, 1810

The chapel bell rang twice—low and slow, like it too was tired of being ignored.

Paul adjusted the weight of the timber on his shoulder and kept walking, boots crunching the frozen mud as he crossed the mission yard. His coat smelled of smoke, sweat, and dust. He hadn’t replaced it since before the baby died. Couldn’t afford to. Wouldn’t, even if he could. Things should last, even if men didn’t.

Downriver, the trees were dark with thaw. It was that season again—between the last frost and the first command from a British officer who thought uniforms granted wisdom. The war had ended, but the next was already warming in the belly of the land. Paul could feel it. In the way the Mohawk hunters kept quiet in the tavern. In the way the Sulpician priests avoided eye contact. In the way Félicité had started praying out loud, as if volume meant protection.

He passed a cluster of girls hauling buckets from the river, laughing in French and Algonquin. One looked just like his cousin Thérèse, same sharp chin, same habit of narrowing her eyes before smiling. It startled him. He’d buried Thérèse three winters ago, her lungs too weak for the storm

That was the thing about this place. The past didn’t leave—it just walked around wearing other people’s faces.

A crow called overhead, low and ragged. Paul muttered a curse. Not because he believed in signs, but because his grandfather had, and that was something.

“Paul!” came a voice from behind—sharp, female, familiar. “You’re late again.”

Félicité.

She stood near the door of their cottage, apron dusted with flour, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her hair was tied back with a strip of old cloth he recognized from a shirt she claimed he ruined three years ago. He hadn’t. But there was no winning that debate. He set the timber down and rubbed his neck.

“You said you’d be back before mid-morning.”

“I said I’d try.”

She gave him a look. That look. The one that could boil fish water.

He shifted, half-grin rising. “Someone needed help loading crates at the quay. British types. Full of themselves.”

“Did you charge them?”

“I didn’t kick them.”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s close.”

She shook her head, but her mouth twitched. That was as close as he’d get to a win today.

They walked back inside, the door creaking behind them. The fire crackled. The stew smelled like turnips pretending to be meat. Félicité stirred it absently.

“I saw your cousin Mathieu again,” she said. “He’s asking questions. About the children. About where you came from.”

Paul didn’t answer. Not right away.

He sat down slow, like the bench held history instead of splinters.

“There’s always someone asking,” he said finally.

She watched him. “And when they ask if you’re Métis?”

“I say yes.”

She nodded once, like that was what she expected—and also what she feared.

“But it’s getting harder,” she admitted. “To explain. Even my mother says we should let it be.”

“That’s because your mother wants the neighbours to think you’re respectable.”

“She wants us to survive.”

“So do I.”

The silence between them wasn’t cold—it was just old.

Paul reached for the ladle and tasted the broth.

“Still turnips,” he said.

“Still you,” she replied.

He looked at her—really looked. The curve of her cheek. The defiance in her chin. The sadness she carried like a folded cloth in her pocket, always near, always clean.

“This place won’t hold,” he said.

She raised a brow.

“I mean the mission. The land. The way things are. The priests are talking. The Crown wants more. And we’re too native for the British, too French for the Mohawk, and too tired for both.”

“So what, we run?”

“We move,” he said. “Again. When it’s time.”

She nodded. “But not today.”

“No,” Paul said. “Not today.”

Outside, a hawk circled the treeline. A dog barked twice. And somewhere upriver, thunder rolled—but the sky stayed clear.

Saint-Benoît, 1826

The door creaked against the wind as Félicité leaned her weight into it. Not that it needed her help—Paul had hammered the hinges back crooked sometime after the last baby died, and it never quite closed right again. Still, she steadied it, hand flat on the wood as if touching it might settle her own unsteady insides.

She was tired in a way no rest seemed to fix. Tired through the bone. Through the breath. The kind of tired that made light feel too loud and voices too sharp.

Nothing ever seemed enough. Not her work. Not her love.

Out back, the fields were still frozen. The ground wouldn’t soften for another few weeks, and even then, the roots would fight her for every carrot. She leaned into the doorway and stared at the hills beyond, the edge of land that marked where Saint-Benoît ended and nowhere began.

“You’re seeing the doctor,” Paul said from behind her.

She didn’t turn. “That man couldn’t tell a fever from a curse.”

“Still better than pretending you aren’t sick.”

She turned then, slow, careful with her weight. “I’m not pretending. I’m just not wasting coin on someone who thinks laudanum solves everything.”

He was still in his work shirt, the sleeves stained and rolled to the elbow, face lined deeper than it had been five years ago. The steamboat job had worn him thin. Back then, she thought he looked tired. Now she knew better. This was exhaustion you wore like skin.

“What about the old woman in Oka?” he said. “The Métis healer. She knew what to do. You remember her teas.”

“I remember her herbs smelling like feet and boiled hope.”

He didn’t laugh, not quite, but something flickered at the edge of his mouth. Then it was gone.

“She helped you, before,” he said. “After Marguerite passed.”

Félicité looked away. Marguerite. The third child to die before their second birthday. She’d buried four now—two infants before baptism, one daughter after fever, and Marguerite from winter coughing that never left her chest.

“I’m not going back there,” she said. “Too many ghosts. Too many graves.”

The silence stretched. Paul didn’t argue. He just reached for his coat. The one with the patched elbows and the collar she’d stitched with bone buttons.

“Then I’ll fetch her,” he said. “If she’ll come this far.”

She shook her head. “She won’t.”

Paul stood in the doorway, looking out across the field, jaw set.

“We moved for work,” he said, quiet. “But now there isn’t enough of that. And there isn’t enough of you left either.”

She smiled at him then, faint and real.

“There’s enough of me to raise what we’ve got,” she said.

Out in the yard, Hippolyte and Isaac were tossing stones into a barrel. Augustin stood nearby, chin high like he thought himself a general. Marie was sitting under the bare maple, plucking at old thread and pretending it might become a shawl.

“Look at them,” she whispered. “What will happen to them?”

“Don’t talk like that,” Paul said.

“I’m sick, Paul.”

Her voice cracked. She coughed once. Then again. Paul stepped toward her, but she held up a hand.

“I’m... It’s just… I need to sit.”

He helped her lower to the bench, careful with her weight.

They sat like that for a while—no fire inside, no warmth outside—just the brittle stillness of waiting for spring.

“Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you’ll tell them who they are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t let them forget. The songs. The stories. Your grandfather. My mother’s mother with the dark braid and medicine hands. Don’t let it all go quiet.”

Paul didn’t speak. He only reached for her hand and wrapped it in his, rough and calloused.

And then, from the yard, a voice:

“Papa! Mama! Look—I caught a mouse!”

Isaac, proud and red-cheeked, held something squirming by the tail.

Félicité groaned. “That one’s going to be trouble.”

Paul smiled. “He’s yours.”

“He’s ours,” she corrected. “Don’t let him forget.”

Saint‑Eustache, 1837

The church bell was the first thing to fall silent.

Isaac remembered its toll from childhood—low, patient, forgiving. Now the steeple stood cracked like a broken tooth, smoke bleeding from its flanks. The bells had stopped, and in their place came musket fire, thudding boots, and the roar of a cannon stationed where the village bakery used to be.

He crouched behind an overturned cart, knuckles white around the musket his father had handed him. His breath came fast, his lungs tight with frost and fear. Blood stained the snow near his boots—someone else’s, not his. Not yet.

Beside him, Paul knelt—face gray with soot, eyes unreadable. His coat, once lined in fur, now hung in tatters. He reloaded in silence, as if he’d done it a thousand times. Maybe he had. Paul Ménard had lived through more endings than Isaac had begun.

“They’re breaching the church,” Isaac hissed. “We have to fall back—”

Paul didn’t flinch. He snapped the flintlock closed.

“No. Not yet.”

“They’ve got cavalry.”

Paul’s eyes didn’t move.

“This is madness.” Isaac’s voice broke. “Why are we fighting a war we can’t win?”

At last, Paul turned his head. His face wasn’t angry. Just tired.

“Because they’ve already won if we don’t stand up.”

A volley cracked the sky. Stone shattered from the parish wall. Patriotes screamed from inside the sacristy. Somewhere beyond, fire took hold of a rooftop. Isaac could smell it—burnt wood and melted wax.

He looked back toward the church, once the heart of the town, now a tomb.

“This isn’t Michilimackinac,” he muttered. “There’s no trade here. No peace. Just graves.”

Paul leaned close.

“No. But there’s memory. And that’s worth bleeding for.”

They ran.

The woods whispered. Everything else screamed.

Isaac’s breath came in clouds as he ran through the underbrush—coat torn, boots soaked, the scent of pine and gunpowder clinging to him like shame. His musket was empty. His heart wasn’t.

Behind him, the forest cracked.

“Keep going,” Paul hissed.

They stumbled together through snow-drifted undergrowth, dodging fallen limbs, musket fire echoing somewhere beyond the trees. A small band of Patriotes had splintered off from the wreckage at Saint‑Eustache, scattering like crows. Isaac and Paul had been among the last to leave.

Paul limped. His right side was bleeding through his coat.

“Leave me,” he muttered.

“Not a chance,” Isaac snapped. “You think I’m letting you die out here? You think I want your ghost haunting me with ‘I told you so’?”

Paul smirked. His breath wheezed, each step slower than the last.

“You’re not made for martyrdom,” Isaac growled. “Neither am I.”

They reached a half-frozen creek—too shallow to hide in, too wide to cross fast. Isaac bent to help Paul across.

Paul stopped.

He was staring back. Listening.

Isaac heard it too.

British voices. Bayonets rattling. The snap of dogs.

“They’re close.”

Paul’s eyes met his.

“You go.”

“No.”

“Isaac—”

“No.”

“This fight,” Paul said, “wasn’t about dying. It was about remembering. You can still do that.”

He pulled a pouch from inside his coat—weathered hide, wrapped with a faded red sash.

“Your grandfather’s. From Michilimackinac.”

Isaac froze. He hadn’t seen it in years.

Paul pressed it into his palm.

“Take it. Go east, circle toward Saint-André. Say nothing to anyone. Not yet.”

Isaac’s mouth opened—but no words came.

Then Paul turned. No hesitation.

He walked into the clearing like a man taking command, not surrendering.

A musket barked.

“Hey!” Paul roared into the trees. “You want someone? Take me.”

Isaac crouched behind the slope, tears freezing on his cheeks, the red sash clutched in his fist. He didn’t look back.

L’Orignal Jail, 1842

The iron door creaked like a dying man’s breath as Isaac stepped into the dim stone corridor. The walls wept moisture. L’Orignal Jail had been built twenty years ago, but it already reeked like the past—sweat, rot, and regret baked into the mortar.

It held over 500 once, they said. Rebels, traitors, farmers with bad timing. Patriotes. Métis.

Isaac’s boots echoed on the flagstone floor as a guard led him forward. Candles flickered in glass sconces. The jail was quieter now, but not empty. The uprisings had ended years ago, but the men who’d believed in them hadn’t all been released. Or forgiven.

They stopped outside a cell.

Inside, his father sat slumped on a wooden bench—legs shackled, face thin, beard gone wiry and grey. Paul Ménard, once of Michilimackinac blood and Oka soil, now just inmate #43. A number on a page in a country that didn’t recognize the name “Métis” unless it was followed by “problem.”

“Open it,” Isaac said.

The guard obliged, slowly.

Paul looked up as the door opened. His eyes, clouded and tired, still sparked with a faint recognition.

“You’re late,” he said.

Isaac stepped inside. He didn’t speak right away. He took in the room—mold crept along the corners, the ceiling sagged. A rusted chamber pot sat in one corner, a tattered blanket in another.

“You were right,” Isaac said finally.

Paul blinked. “About what?”

“They didn’t just burn the villages. They buried the people. Buried us. Language, land, bloodlines. All of it.”

Paul looked down at his chains. “I told them I was Métis when they arrested me.”

Isaac sat beside him, slowly.

“And?”

“They said that wasn’t a people. Just a stain.”

“Papa, we fought for our people. We fought hard.”

They sat in silence. The stone pressed cold into Isaac’s back. His coat was damp from snowmelt.

“You know what they did to Saint‑Benoît?” Isaac said. “They called it an example. Said if we rose again, they’d burn every cradle and seed.”

Paul exhaled. “That was always the plan. Erase the memory, not just the men.”

Isaac clenched his jaw. He thought of his wife—Marcelline—waiting back in Saint-André. She was Métis too, though she no longer used the word. It was safer that way. Easier.

“What did you think would happen?” he asked. “That we’d win? That they’d let us live free?”

Paul’s voice was soft. “No. But I thought if I died standing up, maybe you wouldn’t have to crawl.”

Isaac leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I’ve been crawling since they took you. Every day since.”

Paul nodded slowly. “Then stop. Get up. Raise your boy to remember.”

“How?” Isaac spat. “With what? A name nobody respects? A father who’ll die in a cell?”

Paul coughed—deep and wet. Blood speckled his lip. “Raise him with truth. That’s all I have left.”

The guard cleared his throat outside the door.

Isaac stood. He reached into his coat and pulled out something wrapped in oilcloth—a worn, red sash. His grandfather’s. The one Paul had given him the day he was captured.

“I brought it back,” Isaac said. “For you.”

Paul smiled—thin, cracked. “No. For him.”

Isaac left it on the bench.

He didn’t look back as the door closed behind him, knowing full well his father would be hanged and buried there. A patriote rebel was bad—and as a Métis was worse.

St. André-d’Argenteuil, 1869

The wind came hard off the Laurentians that night, sharp and dry, rattling the old kitchen windows like it wanted in. The stew on the table was starting to go cold—rabbit, tough but tenderized in root vegetables and salt—and neither man had touched it in several minutes. The candle between them flickered.

Pierre set the letter down. The paper was creased from where he’d read it, re-read it, gripped it like it might tear open a different future.

“Angelique wrote from Rainy River,” he said quietly. “They’re talking about a man named Louis Riel out west. Métis. Says he stood up to the Canadian government. Wouldn’t let the surveyors map the land.”

Isaac kept his gaze on the bowl. His spoon floated like a raft on murky broth.

“Talk like that gets a man buried,” he said.

Pierre leaned forward. “He’s not just talking. He’s organizing. Council. Provisional government. He sent Ottawa home with its tail tucked. He’s our people, Papa.”

Isaac’s jaw moved, slow and tight. “Our people,” he echoed, not quite a question, not quite agreement. “Easy to be Métis when the prairie’s still yours.”

“He’s from Red River. Educated in Montreal. Came back when the Hudson’s Bay lands were sold off like scrap. He stopped them from taking everything.”

Isaac set the spoon down with a click. “You think they won’t come back? You think this time it ends differently?”

Pierre didn’t flinch. “I think he stood his ground.”

“So did your grandfather.” Isaac’s voice had cooled to something almost brittle. “At Saint-Eustache. While the church burned and the roofs fell in. We fought. We lost. They lit Saint-Benoît like it was kindling, then locked him away to rot.”

Pierre swallowed. The words caught somewhere behind his ribs.

“You were there too,” he said.

Isaac nodded slowly, eyes unreadable in the candlelight. “I was.”

“And after that?”

“After that,” Isaac said, “I got quiet.”

Pierre looked away, out the window where the wind pressed against the glass.

“So that’s it then?” he said. “Grow potatoes. Keep our heads down. Pretend the blood in us isn’t burning?”

Isaac pushed his chair back slightly. Not far. Just enough to shift the weight of it.

“You think the world listens when Métis speak?” he asked. “They don’t. They listen when we bleed. And then they forget. Or call us traitors. That’s what your grandfather got. Not medals. Not memory. Just a dirt cell in L’Orignal.”

Pierre’s fists curled beneath the table. He thought of the red sash tucked in the trunk beneath his bed. He thought of his grandfather’s name, missing from every page in the school books.

“If Riel has shown us anything,” he said, voice low, “it’s that traitors make nations.”

Isaac said nothing.

“I’ll make noise,” Pierre added. “Plant seeds. Say Métis. And show my son why his blood belongs.”

The candle bent low under a gust from the chimney flue. Isaac blinked slowly. His shoulders looked smaller than Pierre remembered.

“Then don’t forget us when they celebrate him,” Isaac said.

Pierre didn’t answer. He just reached for his spoon.

The stew was cold. But it was theirs.

Toronto, 1885

The air in Toronto smelled like coal smoke and wet stone.

On Queen Street, horses clattered past storefronts plastered in English headlines. “RIEL HANGED,” one read. “EXECUTION AT REGINA.” The ink was still tacky on the newsprint.

Pierre Ménard stood just outside the hardware shop, his hands cracked from work, his back aching from weeks spent laying brick for someone else’s house. The paper snapped in the wind.

Around him, men muttered—bankers in stiff collars, teamsters in oilskin coats, boys selling apples off crates. One man laughed. Another called Riel a lunatic. A shopkeeper crossed himself and turned away.

Pierre said nothing.

He gripped the paper too tightly, creasing the name. Louis Riel. He remembered the man’s letters, his speeches, the way his words had reached all the way to Toronto from Red River like a hand pulling him back to something older, something he was trying hard not to be.

“Papa?”

The small voice came from his side. Joseph Émard, just five years old, still clutching a crust of bread from the bakery. His cheeks were pink from the cold. His eyes—so much like his grandfather’s—searched Pierre’s face for meaning.

“Was he like us?”

Pierre froze.

He looked down at his son, then up again—at the Anglican steeple slicing the gray sky, at the suits walking past like the name Riel meant nothing. Because here, it didn’t.

Not like it had in Saint‑Eustache. Or Saint-Benoît. Or back when Paul still believed rebellion could make a better country.

Pierre knelt slowly, knees popping against the curb.

“No,” he said. “We’re not like him.”

A lie.

But in this city—where French was mocked and being Métis meant being mistaken for a problem—it was safer than the truth.

Joseph nodded, but his brow furrowed. “But he is good.”

Pierre’s voice came out too quickly. “He lost.”

The boy blinked, startled. Pierre softened his tone.

“We don’t speak for the dead, son. We grow. We survive. That’s how we honour our family.”

He didn’t mention the sash buried in a trunk. Or the stories he never told.

Behind them, the church bell rang once—sharp, indifferent.

Pierre stood and took his son’s hand.

And though the word “Métis” burned on his tongue like ash, he swallowed it again. Because the world had made it clear: traitors get hanged. Sons get left behind.

But as they walked home down the muddy street, Émard glanced back once more at the newspaper box. He couldn’t yet read, but someday he would.

And maybe then, the silence would start to crack.

Ottawa, 1902

The saws never stopped screaming.

Somerset Lumber Yard ran six days a week, sunrise to sundown, through wood dust and wet snow, through language and silence. Joseph Émard Ménard walked the length of the yard with a limp he never explained and calloused hands that no one cared to ask about.

He couldn’t read the signs on the walls. But he knew the difference between “danger” and “you don’t belong here” just fine.

They lived three blocks from the yard, he and Albertine—his wife, quiet and patient—and their first two children, always cold, always hungry, but alive. They rented half a rowhouse near Lebreton Flats, where the soot collected on windowsills and the water froze in the washbasin come January.

This was life: hard, gray, and enough.

Until the foreman shouted.

“Hey, half-breed! Quit dragging your damn heels!”

The air went still for a moment. Men turned.

Joseph Émard did not.

He kept walking until the nail barrel was at his feet, then stopped. Slowly. Deliberately.

“I’m not,” he said, voice flat, teeth tight. “Say that again and I’ll break your jaw.”

The other men chuckled—some nervously, some mean.

“C’mon, Ménard,” someone muttered. “You’re as dark as a bloody Injun. Don’t need papers to see that.”

He turned.

Not with fists. With fury. With decades of it.

“My name is Ménard,” he said, loud enough for the saws to pause, “and I am French Catholic. That’s it. My people were builders. Traders. Farmers. Not whatever the hell you’re saying.”

The foreman shrugged. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

The saws roared again.

Joseph walked off, chest burning, jaw clenched. That night, over dinner, he didn’t tell Albertine. He didn’t have to.

She reached across the table, touched his hand.

“You look like your grandfather,” she whispered. “The one your father wouldn’t talk about.”

Joseph didn’t answer.

Because the truth was this: he didn’t know.

All he had were whispers. Gaps. A family name that turned into a muttered word. A father who denied the past, and a world that punished those who didn’t.

He looked out the window. Snow had started to fall, soft on the roof of the shanty behind the yard. Somewhere out there were cousins, maybe kin, who still called themselves Métis. Who had land. Or names. Or pride.

He had a pay stub. And shame.

But he had children now.

And if silence was what had kept his father alive, it would keep his children safe too.

Ottawa, 1926

The wind off the canal came in sharp from the east, slicing through Albertine’s shawl like a blade honed on limestone. She tightened it around her shoulders, guiding little Oscar by the hand as they crossed Preston Street, still rimmed with snowbanks and the rutted tracks of wagon wheels.

A horse hitched to a coal cart snorted steam into the morning air. Its driver tipped his cap without looking.

Cars came now, sure—but on this street, you still smelled oats and manure more than gasoline. Horses hauled milk, firewood, and men’s pride across Little Italy, and Albertine had learned to read the rhythm of hooves like a clock.

Their own house stood on Norman Street, barely three years old, and already leaning like a man with too much debt in his coat pockets. The roof still leaked when the snow melted too fast, and the front step was patched together from leftover pine boards that Joseph had dragged home from the Somerset yard—one under each arm like contraband kindness.

Every night, he’d sit on a crate, boots still on, and hammer something into place. He never said much. Just worked. Built. Like his silence could keep the cold out better than plaster.

Oscar, five and always questioning, slowed his steps.

“Mama,” he said, “why don’t we have a real porch?”

Albertine smiled. Not unkindly. “We’re building it one board at a time.”

“Papa said it leans because it’s thinking too hard.”

She let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh. “Then we best keep feeding it smart ideas.”

At the corner by the parish school, another mother passed them—corset tight, hair tighter—pulling her daughter a little closer as she passed. Albertine caught the glance. Heard the whisper, low but not low enough:

“That’s the one married to the dark one from the yard.”

Oscar didn’t hear it. But he saw the look on his mother’s face. He stopped.

“Mama?”

Albertine crouched to fix his scarf. Her fingers lingered on his collar.

“Go on, mon p’tit. Learn your letters. Build something finer than boards.”

He ran toward the bell, boots kicking up gray snow.

Albertine straightened slowly. Looked up at the brick schoolhouse, at the stone rectory behind it. And then back toward Norman Street, where her husband’s silence had framed their life.

He didn’t speak the word. Métis. He couldn’t.

But Albertine remembered the stories—names said once and never again. Paul. Isaac. Pierre. Stories of rebellions, of men jailed, of houses burned, of children lost. Of silence planted like seed in the cracks between boards.

Their house might’ve leaned, but it stood. And their children? They would stand straighter still.

50 years later

The house was too quiet now.

The radio had gone soft with age—nothing but breathy violin and the low rasp of news no one wanted. A kettle hissed somewhere in the background, but Oscar didn’t move. He was rocking gently, boots flat, knees creaking with every sway of the old chair.

His great-granddaughter slept in his arms.

Andrea.

Two years old and still full of milk-sweet breath, hair dark and heavy across her forehead. Her skin—pale like porcelain, soft as newsprint—and his hand, resting against her back, looked like something carved out of smoke in comparison. Old bark against fine linen.

She stirred. He hushed her without words.

The sun had dropped low, casting long gold stripes across the hardwood. Through the window, the trees along Preston Street waved like they remembered something he didn’t.

Oscar stared at the child.

Where did we come from, little one?

He didn’t know. Not really.

His father, Joseph Émard, hadn’t talked much. Just worked. Hammered boards. Shoveled snow. Bit down words like they were dangerous to say out loud. And Oscar had never asked—too afraid the answer would be silence.

But the questions came now, heavier than the girl in his arms.

What had his grandfather seen? What had his father fought for?

There were whispers. A rebellion. A jail in L’Orignal. A village burned at Saint‑Benoît. A sash someone once said belonged to a voyageur. A name, Ménard, that ran thick with sweat and darker bloodlines.

Oscar had the dark skin. The quiet bones. The nose no one could place.

“Maybe I’m part Spanish,” he used to joke to strangers who asked.

But no one in Little Italy had ever looked at him like he belonged.

Not really.

He shifted the child in his arms. Her cheek pressed warm to his shoulder.

Will you know more than I did?

Will you learn their names? Paul. Isaac. Pierre. Marie. Mite8ameg8k8e.

He didn’t know how to spell it. Didn’t even know how to say it properly.

But he knew—somehow—that she had a right to it.

Oscar rocked slower. The chair moaned beneath him.

We were traders once, he thought. Bridge-builders. Interpreters. Rebels. Builders of homes so crooked they stood against the wind.

He didn’t have proof.

Only the silence where stories should’ve been. The way people had looked at his father. The ache in his bones whenever someone said that name—Riel.

Oscar looked down at her again.

Maybe you’ll say it.

Maybe you’ll find the pieces I lost.

She breathed against him, tiny fingers curled in sleep.

And Oscar—old now, tired, and unknowing—whispered the only story he had to give:

“Your blood is older than this place, little one. Even if I can’t tell you how.”