DID I EVER YELL YOU Gord’s famous pick-up line, from the first time he introduced himself to Sylvie? Sad. Two hicks working for isolation pay deep in the blackfly-riddled thickets of Northern Ontario. “Well mother of Christ, they got Frenchies all the way up here now, do they?” Another excerpt from their storybook romance that Sylvie never cared to talk about. It wasn’t the insult to her language and people, mind you, but the cavalier name-in-vain-taking of Our Holy Mother. Sylvie was about a hundred times more Catholic than Gord. It was all about Notre Dame in Sylvie’s neck of the wood, so my old man’s offhand blasphemy — as natural to Gord as scratching his nuts — came very close to losing him the ball game. Not close enough, unfortunately for every last one of us. If the gods were keeping a pie-plate eye that day, they decided to let the ants go marching blindly forward. Sylvie was wearing hip waders for the occasion, standing with a fishing pole up to her knees in the Firesteel River as my dad came sloshing over, heedless of soaking his pants, more than a little sloshed himself.
