Monday, December 26, 2016

A STORY OF THE TURK                Norman Belanger                           January 2015

a highly fictionalized recounting of events that may or may not have occurred.

   Grand meme and grand pepe died a few weeks apart from each other, in that sunless winter of 1969, when they were both very old.  it was said at the time by the family  that the couple  loved each other so much, neither could live long without the other.

   after my great grandparents passed away, we visited the shrine that was their apartment, in the basement of the mulitgenerational home in thornton, which was until that time strictly off limits. To me, that visit still has the vividness of a childhood dream.

   The place was dim and dusty. strange tapestries and ornate woven rugs covered the walls but did little to keep out the damp. a smell like dried flowers, something  secretive and dank, crept up from the floor.  there was a closet  space where the old woman slept on a cot, and there hung a heavy gold frame over a battered chest of drawers.

   from deep in the shadows, the picture of a young man looked back at me. his gaze was defiant, with a startling steadiness.  He had penetrating dark eyes, and a black mustache, he wore a costume- a blue fez, baggy pants and a white, blousey shirt. The hilt of a dagger was tucked into the sash at his waist.

“that’s the Turk” someone whispered, and a mystery was born. “who was  he?” I asked, but I was hurried out of the room. Still, I would never forget that portrait I saw only that once.  I would never forget those eyes.

   Over the 40 or so years since,though the aunts and uncles were reluctant to talk about the romantic figure ofthe Turk, I have pieced together the half recalled tales, and since I am the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, perhaps it is my job to record the story as I know it.

What follows will be part family myth, part outright lie, part plagiarism, and somewhere, a bit of the truth. I don’t know which is which.

   I was told my grand pepe was joseph, that he was a Frenchman who sailed to cananda to work in the lumbermills. He married a 15 year old girl mary, the daughter of a mic mac indian and an itinerant worker. My great grandmother was known as marie to most who remembered her.

   They lived in a place called Three Rivers, or trois rivieres, in the wilderness, an  endless green forest of pines, where there was always snow. By all accounts, the mill town was a lawless, booming place after the first world war, a hard drinking, hard brawling, scrambling, rambling, hard living kind of a place, where home brewed whiskey and fistfights passed the long winter hours,where fornicating and rutting prevailed after the liquor was all drunk and the fists lay dormant, where the work day whistle blew in the lumber yard each dawn,where the machinery roared to life and the saws buzzed, where pine dust floated in the air and coated every surface not already whitened by the constant snow,where blue shadows brought early evening to the valley and the drinking and rousing resumed.

   As the story goes, mary and joseph enjoyed their first years together in a little white house where they welcomed children that came with a certain regularity.  there were four offspring, the talkative Jeanette, a tow headed toddler joseph junior, blue eyed  Bernadette in rompers, and Maurice still onthe breast, when one spring morning joseph senior hopped on his bicycle with alittle kit bag, supposedly to go in to town for a pack of cigarettes.  maybe, he was illiterate and could not read the signs directing him back homeward. maybe, he went on a bender and suffered amnesia brought on by wood grain moonshine from the neighbor’s still. Or maybehe simply left, took off, disappeared, abandoned marie and her brood to survive as best they could.

  how she did manage, is anyone’s guess,  though it’s been said she was a cook, she worked in a laundry, she wove patterned rugs to sell, she took in boarders. joseph was presumed dead when there was no word of him season after season after season.  a son born in late February of 1921, some 22months after the above mentioned ride to the tobacco shop, suggests that the young mother, if she grieved,  sought some solace in those cold nights bereft of her husband.  The father of the child was not named, and there is no birth certificate in existence.

a foreign man, a mr karaman,  rented a room in the home around this time. he was known for years by the family as Uncle Aga, though it can be supposed he may have in fact sired the boy child who was born that night of the white blizzard.  this was never acknowledged or confirmed by anyone in the family, but it was admitted by some that marie’s son was the very image of the swarthy turk.

    then, a miracle perhaps, the wayward pere joseph peddled back into the valley, back to the little white house, back to the wife and family he had left nearly 8 years before.  Jeanette was by then practically a teenager, working at the mill where she swept mounds of choking pine dust.  JJ was in school. Bernadette and Maurice had grown tall. And there was the child called louis, a dark eyed, dark skinned,stout son, unknown and unfathered by joseph but rechristened by him on his return and known forever more as norman, after the old French town where the  belanger family had come from. norman would one day grow up to become mygrandfather, my pepe, and I would be named after him.

     the depression came and the mill was shut down,seemingly overnight. the family, including uncle aga who still lived upstairs in his attic room, left Canada for  rhode island. supposedly,  uncle karaman had a half brother, or a cousin, or the cousin of a friend, someone named kutamar who worked in a paper mill and had a house on the outskirts of providence.  The man wanted a wife, and it was decided that Jeanette would be married to him in exchange for room and board until the rest of the family got its footing. The belanger clan would never leave the house on star street in thornton.

  Mr karaman then drops out of our story some time after the move from trois riviers.  My father’s uncle junior always maintained that aga was shot behind the sons of Italy club when he was caught cheating at cards. Auntie bernadette often whispered that she heard a jealous husband ran him out of town.

  still,  whatever his fate, his picture would remain on the wall of marie’s  bedroomfor the rest of her life,  in the private basement apartment of  the family house, the home where her husband and children and grandchildren lived,  she kept her secret, a memento of the mysterious handsome man with black eyes.

   The portrait of my greatgrandfather aga karaman itself seems to have vanished sometime after the death of the old people, quite possibly taken by one who wished to keep the whiteness of the family legacy unsullied by speculation, a relic lost in the mists of memory, soon to be forgotten altogether perhaps, another mystery unremembered, unspoken---until now.


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