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thought of establishing a summer village of their own on another island farther out, somewhere beyond Providence? After all, there were plenty of islands nearby.
    The second effect—no doubt the most important—was that Joyce, absorbed in her father’s nautical charts, did not set foot outside her village before the age of twelve.
    Joyce’s mother had died a week after giving birth, reportedly because the head of a capelin had got trapped in her bronchial tube. The details of the story were subject to minor variations. At times it was said to have been a cod vertebra in the lungs, or a herring bone in the windpipe—but one thing was beyond dispute: she had been a victim of the sea.
    As Joyce’s father had never wanted to remarry, she remained an orphan and an only child, captain and commander under God, in other words, in charge of preparing the meals, cleaning the house and doing her homework by herself, all of which she performed as amatter of course by the time she was six. Cooking meant boiling or frying the incidental catches her father would bring home. As for the housekeeping, Joyce botched this job shamelessly. Her father looked with forbearance on the abiding mess.
    But the most gruelling of all these chores was putting up with her father’s family, an assortment of inquisitorial aunts, rowdy cousins and boisterous uncles who were apt to drop in at the slightest opportunity. Joyce’s father, a big-hearted man, could not bring himself to turn out his brothers and brothers-in-law; they entered the house as if it were theirs, invited themselves for dinner, railed loudly against the cod quotas and the offshore inspectors, discussed the latest Japanese dietary trends and stayed to watch
Hockey Night in Canada.
(They were avid fans of Guy Lafleur.)
    Joyce had long understood that the house provided her uncles with a neutral harbour, far from their spouses’ recriminations, at least until one of the wives sallied out to hustle her stray back home, tugging him by the ear or some other bodily protuberance. Actually, this was just about the only reason Joyce’s aunts ever ventured over, which did not prevent them from wagging their heads as they scanned the cluttered dwelling.
    The raucous bunch of cousins made up the most problematical subgroup. They rained down like an infestation of grasshoppers, pulled Joyce’s hair—which from then on she decided to wear short—tripped her upand never missed a chance to have some fun at her expense. They took advantage of her father’s absence to raid the fridge, snatching beer and smoked herring which they would pick apart in front of the television. In order to drive back this wild, not fully housebroken horde, Joyce defended herself with forks and frying pans.
    To offset her father’s invasive family, Joyce relied on the invisible, absent family of her mother, now whittled down to a single member: Grandfather Doucet.
    Lyzandre Doucet lived alone in a ramshackle house erected on the shore a few kilometres from the village. He was rarely seen outside his home, and no one ever paid him a visit.
    Joyce loved everything about her grandfather: his wrinkled hands, the bandana over his left eye, the vile, port-flavoured cigarillos that he smoked all day long and, above all, the thousand amazing stories that he would relate to her endlessly. Every afternoon, after school, she would run to see him. Sitting in the kitchen, he would drink a scalding blend that left rust-coloured rings in his cups and a bitter taste in the throat, that her grandfather called tea.
    It was in this kitchen that Lyzandre Doucet revealed to his granddaughter the family’s great secret.
    Appearances notwithstanding, he assured her, Joyce was the last descendant of a long line of pirates going back all the way to Alonzo and Herménégilde Doucette, also known—depending on the circumstances, the locationand the subtleties of the prevailing grammar—as Doucet, Doucett, Douchette, Douchet, Douchez,