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Lowell, MA: Poet Paul Marion

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(page 4 of 5)

This starts him on the stories. He's so full of stories, and of their connections to one another and the lessons he sees in them, that when he goes to tell you one, it will start out clear and linear, like anyone's family story, but then branch out and loop back and link up with others, until what you thought was a simple piece of cloth is suddenly a tapestry.

The monument, he tells me now, was placed here by the priests of St. Jean-Baptiste parish, "to mark the passing of Little Canada," their name for the neighborhood. The church, he says--now standing empty--is on Merrimack Street, one street over from Moody, where his grandfather's butcher shop was ("His store is a parking lot today"). On every street in the neighborhood--Aiken, Cabot, Cheever, Coolidge, and the others, all the streets named on the monument--"the tenements were as dense as Hell's Kitchen in New York." They were so dirty and low-class, he goes on, that his mother, from the Centralville neighborhood on the other side of the river, "wouldn't be caught dead here as a girl"--but still somehow wound up with his father, who grew up on Cheever Street. This starts him on his father, and the work he did grading wools: "a rare skill," he says to me now as his thoughts near the end of their looping--and there's something like pride in his tone--"to be able to grade the wool, one fleece from another, based only on its look and feel ..."

The stories go on, sometimes sideways, just as often backward in time: about his father, a machine gunner with the Fourth Infantry Division, who marched across Germany, then came home to grade fleeces in Lowell; his father's father, Wilfrid the butcher; Wilfrid's father, the carpenter Doda, who married Rosalba, a weaver on a textile loom; and before Doda, Joseph, also a carpenter, who came south in the 1880s from Quebec. He can trace it back all the way to a merchant named Nicholas, from Normandy, who came with his bride to New France--Quebec--and settled there and raised a family, around 1665.

They're all gone now. His father's mill is gone--all the mills are gone--along with the butcher shop, St. Jean-Baptiste parish, the department store. Little Canada was bulldozed in the '60s--a late victim of urban renewal, which had already taken the Greek Acre and other neighborhoods--to make way for public housing. The downtown emptied: the stores, the Strand Theatre, the sidewalk markets, all shuttered or moved to the malls. Buildings, whole blocks, were burned or flattened; parking lots replaced businesses; the population fell by a quarter; unemployment reached 12 percent. "Somebody ought to drop a bomb on this place," a high school history teacher told Paul's brother's 10th-grade class in the mid-1960s. It was the city's darkest time.

"They were here, and then they were gone," Paul is saying now. It's early evening. We've been driving, for the past 30 minutes, the little grid of streets just east and west of the Aiken Street (Ouellette) Bridge, the neighborhoods' old dividing point, and have come full circle back to the monument's little grass island. I've had the full tour, both sides of the river: the parking lot where Wilfrid's market once stood; the shuttered old neighborhood church; a blighted, prewar building complex, North Common Village, where men in undershirts sit in clusters on front stoops; the four-story red-brick fortress, St. Louis School, now in its 103th year, where, Paul once told me, his mother and Jack Kerouac, both Centralville natives, were schoolmates nearly 80 years ago; Paul's birthplace on Orleans Street, still a tidy two-family.