Lives ruined

My father was barely 7 the day the messenger came, running through the fields near Baie Ste-Marie*, in the French colony of Acadia, yelling his lungs out.

"Les Français ont perdu! Et ils laissent des possessions d'Amérique aux Anglais!" The French have lost the war! And they're leaving some American possessions (colonies) to the English!

In 1713, the war for Spanish succession was ended with the defeat of the French, who had wanted the grandson of Louis XIV on the trone of Spain. The Treaty of Utrecht had been harsh on the French, forcing them to give away some American territory to the English in order to keep what they had in Europe. They kept the islands of St-Jean (St-John) and Royale, but had to give away the Hudson bay, Newfoundland and…

"Et l'Acadie" ended the messenger. And Acadia. My father told me once he never felt his own father go so stiff, like a piece of wood. Silence had fell over the small room where the farmers had joined to listen to the messenger's tale. My grandfather's callused hand had squeezed my father's shoulder, and he had known from that moment that things weren't going to be easy.

The Acadians were French above all. But now, without choice, and without so much of a fight from France to keep them under her wing, they were English property.

But the Acadians weren't going to make it easy for their new owners. They refused to take the oath to England they had to take in order to be considered an English citizen, and continued owing allegeance to France, and practising the catholic rite. As the years went by, the English began to consider the Acadian people as a threath to their plans to conquer all French and Spanish territory in America.

My grandfather died, and my father, as the only living child remaining, took over the family farm, situated in Western Acadia, near Baie Ste-Marie. I remember being able to see the never ending horizon of the sea on very beautiful days, and we were able to tell the weather many days forward. It was a fair sized farm, I have to say, and it was known up to Port Royal and Grand-Pré that the LeBeaus were, if not a wealthy family, at least living quite well, considering what an Acadian farmer could hope in these times. My father Jean-Luc married young with a neighbor's daughter, Mariette Dubois, and they had their first son in 1725, Henri.

I was born in the beginning of April of 1729, and was the fifth in a family of eight children. My father was lucky to have five sons out of eight, as sons were preferable to daughters, and probably was very proud of all of us, although he never spoke a word about it. My younger brother, Maximien, became a priest, and it might have been the best decision in his life. Me, along with my three older brothers, Henri, François and Jules, worked from dawn to dusk with Father to make the farm work, and my sisters, Marguerite, Madeleine and Jacqueline, helped my mother until the day they married and went away.

I was the last to marry, though I was still young to do so.

Belle Boudreaux had to be the most beautiful woman in all Western Acadia, and although I never really believed in love at first sight, there was something between us from the day I saw her. She had came to the LeBeau farm along with her mother and sisters to help Mother with some apple pie baking, and my brothers and I had chosen that moment of the day to head back to the house in search of food. She was there, bright blonde hair pulled back to the back of her head, flour all over her arms and apron, laughing with the other women, and shinning blue eyes settling on me as we came in the kitchen, dirty with cow droppings and strays of hay in our hair. Even today, I remember the way her eyes twinkled when she laughed along with the other women at our sight (with the slight exception of Mother, who let out a yelp of alarm before kicking us out of her clean kitchen with a broomstick, with strict orders of getting cleaned up before hazarding a foot back in). I saw her often at the farm after that, and we quickly fell in love.

We married on New Years day, dawn of the year of 1749. You have no need to count: I was nineteen, going on twenty, and she was seventeen. And by the end of the year, at Christmas, Belle held in her arms our first bundle of joy, Alexandre. Beautiful Éloïse came two years later, in 1751, and Sylvain and Julien came respectively in 1752 and 1754. At age 25, I was father of four, and as proud as humanely possible.

By that time, the English had built many fortifications on the territory of Acadia, renamed by the English as Nova Scotia, and had a big fort, Fort Lawrence, built a few miles away from Fort Beauséjour and Fort Gaspareau in New-Brunswick, a French possession. From the moment that fort was built, in 1750, we Acadians smelled that something bad was going to happen. And we knew from the start that we weren't going to be on the Englishmen's side. We had been fighting for nearly forty years for our French roots, we certainly weren't going to fight our own brothers. In the spring of 1755, what had to happen, happened, and the English attacked Fort Beauséjour. Many Acadians, my brother François among them, went there to fight along the French's side, but very few came back. The English won and took prisonners, and François never came back home. New-Brunswick now belonged to the English, and the Acadians were now known as a real threath that had to be eliminated.

We were worried, but we never would have guessed the English would have gone so far. We received a letter at the farm during the summer, and it was my mother, the only one who could read, who read it to us out loud. Every man older than sixteen in every house of Western Acadia was to go to Grand-Pré, in order to listen to lieutenant-colonel Winslow's declaration of His Majesty's orders, on september 3, 1755.

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The day we left, I felt sick. Something was going to go all wrong. An unknown force made me turn back just before I hopped on the carriage. All my brothers, as well as my father and brothers-in-law, were already in the carriage, and our wives and kids were standing in front of the big family house. I spotted my own little family when Belle stepped forward, baby Julien in her arms, and little Sylvain clutching her skirt. He looked scared, and I wondered for a moment if young children could sense it when something went wrong. Maybe they could, I would never know. I walked away from the carriage, and hugged Belle with all my might.

"Don't go, Remy. Something's not right with this big reunion." She looked up at me, her blue eyes filled with fear. "The English'll trick you, I know it."

"Of course not." My voice sounded wrong, and I'm not sure I even believed in what I said. "They tried to trick us many times, Belle. We're not going to let them hurt us again." She hid her face in my shirt, a sob shaking her shoulders.

"I couldn't bear it if they took you away, Remy…"

"Shhh, Belle…" I took her by the shoulders, gently pushing her away, and smiled down at her. "They're not going to take me away. I'll be back soon." I smiled at the squirming baby in her arms, and drop a light kiss on his forehead. I kneeled in front of Sylvain, and he opened his arms to hug my neck.

"Be back soon, papa?"

"Of course I will." I felt another pair of arms trying to get around my back, and looked up to see Éloïse smiling at me, her big blue eyes, so much like her mother's, sparkling with intelligence.

"You'll be back before Julien's birthday, oui? He's gonna be one year old!" I smiled and ruffled her hair, ruining the ponytail, and ignored Belle's glare as she saw the result in her daughter's hair. I turned to Alexandre, standing behind Belle, and trying to look as tall as possible, which wasn't much, considering he was only six years old. I got up, and looked down at him. He rose chocolate brown eyes to meet my own, face written all over with hope.