New Pine Hill

"On this site grew the heart
of the Franco-American community.
Hard working French-Canadians
came to fill the mills of Lowell
and build a tradition of faith,
generosity, and pride."
                      Little Canada Memorial

Mr. Alphonse Hudon,
wearing a blue parka and dress hat,
leans on his cane on Pawtucket Street,
checking the freshly tarred walk
and grove of short pines
along the Northern Canal.
"Looks good, doesn't it?," I ask.
And he says, "I liked it better the way it was,"
which opens up a line of talk,
because I know he's missing
the French-Canadian-American village
that once colored this shoulder of land
at the wide bend in the river.

I tell him my father, Marcel,
was raised on Cheever Street
in what was their Little Canada.
And he says he knew my father
and grandfather, Wilfrid,
whose meat market filled a corner
at Austin and Moody.

He corrects me on the address
of Marquis' garage, where my dad
had our family car serviced
before the wrecking cranes pulled up.
I recall a house across the street
with a tree poking through the front porch roof.
"Oh, yes," he says, "that was Mr. Marquis' house.
And there was a monkey there, too."

The black-and-white sign on the canal bridge reads:
"Jean-Paul Frechette - The Blond Tiger,"
with his two dates underneath.
Another remnant,
like the Little Canada memorial,
bronze plaque mounted on a granite stone
"from one of the last blocks
or wooden apartment houses to be torn down,"
placed by Franco-Americans
and the priests of St. Jean Baptiste parish,
now a Latino Catholic church,
Nuestra Señora Del Carmen.

There's a fleur-de-lis in each corner,
beginning and end dates,
1875 - 1964,
like a gravestone, like one life,
and a litany of streets running up the sides:
Aiken, Cabot, Cheever, Coolidge, Hall, Melvin,
Montcalm, Pawtucket, Perkins, Suffolk, Tucker, Ward.
The amen is Quebec's motto,
Je Me Souviens! - Lest We Forget!

All that history and geography
in a supersaturated marker,
tucked between evergreens on Aiken Street,
in the middle of what was once
a district so dense only Hell's Kitchen beat it.
You stuck an arm out the window
to touch the next tenement.

You heard one tongue for blocks.
People ate, slept, drank, and dreamt
in a native sound arranged like code.
Rag man, icebox, coal chute, baseball.
Pork pie, baked beans, mill rat, whiskey.
High Mass, soirée, L'Étoile, soupe rouge.

What was here is what Mr. Hudon liked better,
a familiar world that seemed to work
for people who got up in the morning
with something to do.
Even I remember, though I was a kid
when Urban Renewal clear-cut the blocks.

The way he looked down the long canal
made me want to say something hopeful.
I admire the young trees,
the sweeping path,
whose design takes us to the manmade channel
and black water that still moves the wheels.

The rough, stubby foundation stone
is a local version of the monolith
from 2001: A Space Odyssey,
the one that made the monkeys go ape,
the one the moon-men couldn't figure,
the floating answer-bar.
This hunk of rock on Earth
states its case for the record,
like the metal message boards
shipped out with satellites,
telling somebody out there who we are.

Copyright © 1997 by Paul Marion

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Copyright © 2001 by The Bridge Review: Merrimack Valley Culture and University of Massachusetts Lowell. All Rights Reserved for compilation. Rights revert to individual contributors following publication. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher and individual contributor.