Alcide’s Bereavement and Self-Exile

Alcide Bolduc’s grief after Marie-Ange D’Anjou’s death develops into a larger estrangement from his family, his faith, and ordinary life. Having first entrusted Loïc to Guillaume D’Anjou, he comes to regret the arrangement and resents what he sees as the loss of his paternal rights. A public custody confrontation brings that accumulated bitterness to the surface; later, Alcide Bolduc seeks distance in northern aviation, where his plane disappears in a storm. His self-exile therefore ends not in a known destination but in an absence that leaves his children without their father.

Bereavement and the changing meaning of custody

Before Loïc’s birth, Alcide Bolduc and his brother-in-law Guillaume D’Anjou had good relations. Alcide Bolduc had even chosen Guillaume D’Anjou as the child’s godfather. When Marie-Ange D’Anjou died, Alcide Bolduc himself designated Guillaume D’Anjou to adopt the baby. The adoption began, then, not as an act imposed on him, but as a decision made in the aftermath of loss and amid the practical demands of caring for a child whose mother had died.

Over time, however, Alcide Bolduc regretted having placed Loïc with the D’Anjou family. He treated the adoption as though he had surrendered the inheritance of his blood to a rival clan, although his great love had been a D’Anjou. His grief and his claim to fatherhood thus became difficult to separate: the child was bound both to the wife whose death he could not accept and to the family he now saw as possessing what was his. The account also notes that Alcide Bolduc regarded the baby as associated with Marie-Ange D’Anjou’s death, a poisoned gift from Heaven. That painful association shadows his paternal attachment without erasing it.

Alcide Bolduc imagined that he would eventually reclaim his children, but he did not act on that intention. He gave himself time, and the years passed. His distance from them was therefore not simply a settled rejection: it coexisted with a future plan to take them back, a plan repeatedly deferred while his life drifted elsewhere.

The confrontation and accumulated anger

The dispute in Touladi’s main street was the immediate spark, not the full cause, of the rupture. The issue began with a seemingly ordinary quarrel around a clearing, but it had become both a family dispute and a contest between two powerful families in the village. Residents gathered to watch; beneath their expressions of outrage, some welcomed a spectacle that promised months of conversation in an otherwise monotonous life.

For Alcide Bolduc, the challenge to his authority as Loïc’s father was intolerable. He believed that his blood tie gave him a claim that would endure, even though he had entrusted the child to Guillaume D’Anjou. In his mind, the present challenge joined years of regret and bitterness. The quarrel released anger accumulated against time, fate, misfortune, and a life he felt had treated him unjustly. Those who opposed him became, in the moment, representatives of that wider adversity, and his response turned brutal.

His anger also extended to God. Alcide Bolduc blamed God for taking Marie-Ange D’Anjou and no longer prayed with conviction. He continued to attend church formally, without openly declaring a break, but blasphemed often enough to distress his devout mother, who prayed for his soul. The contrast is stark: the practices of faith remained as outward habits, while grief had hollowed out the belief they once expressed. His resentment over custody, then, belongs to a wider estrangement rather than standing alone as a legal or domestic disagreement.

Guillaume D’Anjou and the divided family claim

The confrontation’s force came partly from the fact that both men understood themselves to be defending a legitimate bond with Loïc. Guillaume D’Anjou had taken responsibility for his sister’s child after her death and regarded the adoption as a duty and a lasting right. He remembered Marie-Ange D’Anjou with grief and believed Alcide Bolduc had been an irresponsible husband and father who had caused her sorrow and neglected the children. His certainty sharpened the conflict: to him, Alcide Bolduc’s claim was not a return to a responsibility faithfully maintained but an assertion by a father who had been absent for much of the children’s lives.

The narrative complicates Guillaume D’Anjou’s certainty by connecting his indignation to his own history. Alcide Bolduc’s drinking and conduct recalled Guillaume D’Anjou’s difficult relationship with his father, who had also been drawn to drink and women. Guillaume D’Anjou’s feelings toward that father had been divided between love and resentment. The dispute over Loïc therefore carried an echo of an earlier family wound: the argument was not only over who had the right to raise a child, but also over the pain and anger each man brought to the idea of fatherhood.

The story presents the clash as a conflict of frustrated attachments. Alcide Bolduc’s claim arose from blood, bereavement, and regret; Guillaume D’Anjou’s from adoption, responsibility, and devotion to the boy. Their opposing claims left Loïc caught between them. As Guillaume D’Anjou lay unconscious after the confrontation, Loïc feared that his adoptive father might die and connected the crisis to himself. At the same time, Alcide Bolduc’s departure would soon make the two paternal absences literal: one father would be taken to hospital, the other would take to the air.

Flight from Touladi and work in the North

After the confrontation, Alcide Bolduc left Touladi by plane in moonlight. Those in the house heard an aircraft’s engine from the direction of the lake and assumed it was his. He had taken off without a clear destination, and no one knew when he would return. The departure gave physical form to his long-standing escape from domestic reality: he had been drifting above the claims of family life, and now he flew away from them outright.

Alcide Bolduc later sought forgetfulness in the work of northern aviation. In autumn 1951, Johnny Parent hired him at Mont-Joli for Hollinger Ungava Transport. Alcide Bolduc had offered his services as a mechanic to the Iron Ore Company of Canada, which was building a railway through northern Quebec and Labrador to exploit a major iron-ore deposit. His experience as a pilot soon led to work on the air service operating day and night between Sept-Îles and Schefferville, with Labrador City on the railway route. The job placed him within a vast construction undertaking in a remote landscape, far from the domestic life he had left behind. The account presents the long hours of work and the occasional leisure as a possible escape from his drinking, domestic misfortune, and sense of decline.

Disappearance and its consequences

In February 1953, Alcide Bolduc left Sept-Îles at the controls of a DC-3, accompanied by a copilot and carrying a full load of cement bags, mechanical parts, and food supplies. The flight to Schefferville was expected to take place by day and the return at night, making a five-hour round trip. Some bad weather was forecast for the region. The aircraft never returned to Sept-Îles; radio contact was lost, apparently after it became lost in the storm.

After several weeks of searching, the company reported that the plane had disappeared in the frozen expanses of the North, possibly crashing into a remote lake or the ocean. Its fate remained unknown. The company provided a generous pension for Alcide Bolduc’s children, which helped pay for Loïc’s education. The material support produced a concrete consequence of the disappearance, but it could not resolve the emotional uncertainty: the father who had left in search of distance did not come back, and the family was left without a confirmed account of his final moments.