Loïc D’Anjou—Alcide Bolduc relationship

Loïc D’Anjou—Alcide Bolduc relationship concerns a biological bond repeatedly separated from the daily work of parenthood. Alcide Bolduc is Loïc’s birth father, but after the death of Loïc’s mother, Marie-Ange D’Anjou, the infant is raised by his maternal uncle and aunt, Guillaume D’Anjou and Marie-Louise D’Anjou. Alcide first consents to that arrangement and later contests its meaning, claiming an enduring paternal right by blood. Their relationship consequently develops less through shared life than through custody conflict, absence, and Loïc’s imagination of the father he scarcely knows.

Birth, Bereavement, and Adoption

After Marie-Ange’s death, the newborn Loïc is considered fragile, and relatives decide that Guillaume and his daughter Laurette should take him home so that he can be better cared for. Guillaume gathers his family and asks them to look after his sister’s child. Loïc is baptized soon afterward, with Guillaume and Marie-Louise as godparents. They agree to adopt him with Alcide’s consent, while the Bolduc family takes responsibility for Alcide’s other two children.

The arrangement begins not as an open dispute but as a response to a family emergency. Alcide had previously been on good terms with Guillaume and had even chosen him as Loïc’s godfather. After Marie-Ange’s death, Alcide himself designated Guillaume to adopt the infant. This history matters to the later quarrel: the man who will insist that no one can take his son from him had once entrusted that son to his brother-in-law, while grieving and in no position to care for the child himself.

The Custody Conflict

Over time, Alcide comes to regret having placed Loïc with the D’Anjou family. He understands the adoption as having transferred the inheritance of his blood to a rival family, and he maintains that his paternal claim remains, even though Loïc has grown up in another household. Germaine Bolduc and others are said to have helped intensify his regret. The dispute is therefore both intimate and familial: Alcide’s blood claim confronts the established care and adoptive rights of Guillaume, who had taken responsibility for the child after his mother died.

A dispute over an ordinary matter involving a clearing becomes the immediate trigger for a public confrontation. Alcide’s anger has accumulated over years of loss and resentment: he associates Loïc with Marie-Ange’s death, yet also regards the boy as his son and resents having yielded him to the D’Anjous. The narrator describes the child as a poisoned gift from Heaven in Alcide’s perception, a contradiction that captures the father’s divided response to him. Alcide’s grief over his wife has not subsided; he drinks, withdraws from religious practice, and feels wronged by fate. When challenged, he directs that stored-up bitterness at those around him.

Guillaume’s claim is grounded in the care he has provided and in the adoption Alcide once approved. He remembers the child as having been left with him after his beloved sister’s death and refuses to surrender the responsibilities he accepted. The confrontation thus pits two accounts of fatherhood against each other: Alcide’s insistence on biological connection and Guillaume’s insistence on sustained care. The quarrel draws the village into the street and becomes a spectacle, at once a family conflict and an expression of rivalry between powerful local families. Loïc tries to make himself inconspicuous as the adults argue over where he belongs.

Departure and Disappearance

The confrontation ends with Alcide leaving by airplane under the moonlight, with no clear destination and no indication of when he might return. At the same time, a doctor arrives and determines that Guillaume must be taken to hospital in Notre-Dame-du-Lac. For Loïc, the two men who occupy the opposing positions of fatherhood are suddenly both absent: one is taken away ill, while the other has flown off. The narrative presents the child as left without a father or a point of reference. Alcide’s departure does not resolve the custody dispute; it turns a conflict over his claim into a more lasting absence.

Alcide’s work in the North becomes a means of escape from the death of his wife and the dispersal of his children. In autumn 1951, he is hired after offering his services as a mechanic to the Iron Ore Company of Canada, which is building a railway in northern Quebec and Labrador. His experience as a pilot soon leads to work on the air route between Sept-Îles and Schefferville, serving the communities linked by the developing railway. The long flights over an isolated landscape offer distance from his domestic losses, though the account does not present them as a reconciliation with his children.

In February 1953, Alcide pilots a loaded DC-3 from Sept-Îles toward Schefferville with a copilot. The cargo includes cement, mechanical parts, and food supplies; poor weather is expected, and the return journey is planned for night. The aircraft never returns, and radio contact is lost, apparently after it strays into a storm. Following several weeks of searching, the company announces that the plane has disappeared in the frozen North, perhaps in a remote lake or the ocean. It offers a pension to Alcide’s children, helping, among other things, to pay for Loïc’s education. More than twenty years later, the aircraft’s remains and the scattered bones of Alcide and the copilot are found on an isolated Labrador peak near the ocean. The discovery confirms the death that had remained uncertain for decades, but it cannot restore a relationship that had already been marked by separation.

The Father in Loïc’s Imagination

When he learns that Alcide’s aircraft has disappeared, Loïc is ill with measles, mumps, and jaundice, one infection following another. Confined to the house, he imagines his father enclosed in the flying machine as it rises, descends, and turns through the snowstorm. His own fever and the snow beyond the window become the setting for a private effort to picture what has happened to a father he cannot reach. The flight is both a concrete disappearance and an image around which the child’s mind can circle without finding an answer.

The fear persists in another form. After a funeral gathering, Loïc imagines himself in Alcide’s plane, with Momo beside him, and fears that his father may come to take them both away for an endless flight. The thought brings on a fear of dying that has recurred since the confrontation between the fathers. The passage does not equate the imagined journey with an actual encounter; instead, it shows how the adult quarrel, Alcide’s departure, and the later disappearance have entered the child’s expectation of danger. An image of Solange eventually displaces the fear and allows him to fall asleep, but it does not settle the unanswered question of his father’s fate.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship makes visible the difference between descent and parenthood as lived responsibility. Alcide is Loïc’s biological father and initially gives permission for the adoption, then experiences that choice as a loss of his bloodline and attempts to reclaim its force. Guillaume, by contrast, acts as Loïc’s father through adoption and daily care, although his sudden hospitalization leaves the child vulnerable at the moment Alcide departs. Neither blood nor formal adoption prevents the child from experiencing the conflict as a loss of secure attachment.

Alcide’s eventual disappearance gives the unresolved dispute a final, stark consequence. His children receive a pension, and Loïc’s education benefits from it, but financial provision cannot answer the questions the father’s absence leaves behind. For Loïc, the missing aircraft becomes a continuing inner image: his father is at once a real man lost in the North and a figure in dreams of flight, death, and abandonment. The relationship’s defining outcome is therefore not reconciliation or a settled transfer of authority, but a son’s enduring inheritance of uncertainty.