Snails
Freddy never knew his paternal grandfather — he had died before Freddy’s birth. But he’d heard stories.
His grandfather’s name was Jean Hebert de Longpre. He was born on January 1, 1900, in a small village in the province of West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, the oldest of three sons and two daughters.
Towards the end of World War I, Jean’s father, Alain, was killed not far from his home, murdered by a German soldier in an argument over his bicycle, which Alain refused to surrender to the retreating invader.
Shortly after his father’s meaningless death, Jean went to work on a grain and dairy farm to help support his family: baling hay, milking cows, spreading manure, avoiding the remnants of the war.
By the fall of 1920, he’d become the farmer’s most trusted worker and he’d fallen in love with the farmer’s eldest daughter, Isobel. He asked her father for her hand as New Year’s Eve became 1921 and they were to be married in June, after the first harvest of the season.
Spring came and the farmer had a bounty of grain to deliver to market. He hired some extra hands (including Jean’s two younger brothers) for the weeklong trip and left his son-in-law-to-be in charge of the farm while he was away.
Though Jean kept the farm running smoothly, it was in that particular week that the farmer’s most prized dairy cow decided to go dry, completely dry, milk no more. Whether it was the farmer’s absence or an act of God (it certainly was that), no one could say.
Perhaps the Holstein was feeling suicidal; for a beast that gives no milk is also known as “dinner”. Jean scoffed at the beast’s refusal to give it up and waited for the farmer’s return before preparing a month’s worth of steaks. The farmer wasn’t quite as glib about the cow.
When he returned to find his darling empty and doomed for execution, he blamed Jean. Sad and enraged, he told his future son-in-law, in his native tongue, “If that’s how you run a farm, perhaps I should find a more suitable husband for my daughter!” It sounded far more threatening in angry French.
Poor Jean, in all his hard-headedness, called the farmer’s bluff and retorted, “Well, now you don’t have a choice, you stupid old man!”
And so, at the age of twenty-one, he called off his wedding ten days shy of the ceremony and decided out of the blue to get as far away from the war-torn Flemish countryside as he could.
He wrote a letter to Isobel, which his brother, Frederic, delivered and within a week, Jean had booked passage to Southampton, England. He worked hard labor there for a month, employed by the same company that had several years previous built an infamous vessel called Titanic.
From Southampton, he took a ship across the Atlantic to what he hoped would be a better life.
He arrived in the port of Halifax at the beginning of August 1921, and immediately began looking for work, along with thousands of other immigrants whom had spent their last $250 on Canadian landing fees. To simplify things and make prospective employers believe he was English, he changed his last name to “Long”, a symbol of his metamorphosis — Jean Hebert Long.
Through a bilingual acquaintance, he heard of farms on the Canadian Prairies that were offering jobs to “reliable and strong hands”. With a dwindling pocket of cash, he stowed away on a freighter to Montreal. He found the French-Canadians in Montreal to be ruder than any Parisian he’d ever met and barely able to speak the French language correctly.
He hopped a train to Thunder Bay and another further west, finally arriving in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on August 22, 1921.
Jean quickly found work on a nearby farm. After all he’d been through, the journey he’d taken, it was easy labor for him, not much different than his first days working for Isobel’s father. He was the employee of the month.
He’d never experienced the Canadian prairie winter, however, and a year-and-a-half later, never wanted to again. He moved to the Southern Ontario farmbelt, about an hour from Buffalo, New York.
Jean worked three seasons there before opening up his own one-seater barbershop in the small country village of Guelph, Ontario. He met a lovely young Irish immigrant named Rebecca O’Malley whom he married in 1928. She gave birth in 1930 to Alain Frederic Long, Freddy’s father.
All of that, a future, countless journeys of innumerable descendants, roads and paths and courses of unknown circumstance, free reins upon untamed horses running beyond the horizon, the black stretch of nothingness through which eyes and minds cannot see, forever, a life led, all of that… because… the cow… went dry.
To Freddy, that, in no uncertain terms, is an act of God.
