Free 21 Days in October by Magali Favre Page A

who’s been wreaking havoc on our neighbourhood for years. And now a bunch of bums who think they’re better than everyone come and screw everything up.”
    â€œSpeaking of your father, I bet you were just messing with me when you said that your great-grandfather knew Louis Riel.”
    â€œNot at all!”
    Gaétan begins to tell her the family legend, carefully handed down over the past three generations.
    His great-grandfather’s name was Lionel Simard. He had only one leg, and when you asked he’d tell you how he lost the other one in a battle against the English. It was his pride and joy.
    He had begun to work in Montréal at a young age, as a day hand for the Masson family. There he’d met a young man from the immense prairies that stretch as far as the eye can see on the other side of the Great Lakes. His name was Louis Riel. He studied at the Collège de Montréal’s Petit Séminaire and had only one desire: to return to the banks of the Red River. Lionel listened for hours as Louis described the immensity of the region’s fertile land and the miraculous buffalo hunts. In his mind, this wild, bountiful nature was meant to be shared among all people of good will. So when Louis Riel returned to his lands, Gaétan’s great-grandfather, then only seventeen, didn’t think twice before going with him.
    Lionel cleared a plot of land that ran like a strip up from the Red River and a long way into the land behind. He built a camp with help from Louis Riel and his Métis friends. The families were very close-knit. Whenever one of them went through a difficult spell, they all helped each other. Life there was rough, and without the knowledge picked up from the Indians, few would have survived. Lionel managed one wheat harvest, but the following year everything was destroyed by locusts. Luckily, there was hunting, fishing, and the fur trade with the highest bidder winning, be it the American or the British companies. So they managed to survive, even when crops failed.
    But the Canadian government at the time had strong views on how the region would be developed, since it had just been bought from the Hudson Bay Company. And the Métis had no place there.
    When government surveyors came to divide up the land English-style, as if no one had ever lived there, the Métis banded together to prevent them from completing their paperwork. Louis Riel became their leader and formed a temporary government. Lionel was wounded during a battle with the English settlers who had come from Ontario to settle on land he had cleared himself. He was wounded in the leg and it had to be amputated. For him, it was the end of a dream. He came back to Montréal, never to set foot on the Prairies again. As family legend goes, Lionel Simard, the tough, uncompromising man who had managed to raise a family of twelve children on only one leg, had cried the day they hung Louis Riel.
    â€œI even think my father still has a picture of Lionel in front of his camp on the Red River.”
    â€œYou’ve got to show me! I’ll make a photocopy and put it in with my paper,” says Louise.
    Gaétan can’t believe that an old family story he’s never paid much attention to fascinates the girl. He watches her earnestly write down his story in her notebook, savouring being the object of her interest.

16
Friday, October 30
    I t’s three o’clock in the morning. Gaétan takes his place next to the spinner with a heavy heart. At the end of the large machine room where the noise is deafening, a shabby little room with a few picnic tables and a vending machine invites the workers to have a bite to eat during their breaks.
    As he does every night, Gaétan goes in to gulp down two bottles of Coke to keep his eyes open until the end of his shift.
    Today, a woman who could have been his mother was crying in a corner. She had just been fired for missing a few days of work because one