by Eric Dupont
The sermon was sweeter than usual.
Meanwhile, Old Ma Madeleine was at her wit’s end. On the one hand, the young American was as nice as could be, showed an uncommonly healthy appetite for work, and had won the approval of Louis-Benjamin’s young sisters, with whom she shared a room. She helped the girls get dressed in the morning, braided their hair, kept them clean, and taught them good manners. To say thank-you. To clear the table. To smile. On the other hand, no one knew the first thing about the woman. Where had she come from? Why hadn’t she learned French like everyone else? Had Alphonse’s family taken to English to fit in better in the United States? And what about the girl’s past? Was she going to transmit some terrible disease to her Louis-Benjamin? And in the improbable event she agreed to hand over her oldest son to this mysterious American, would their children grow up to look down on their Canadian father?
One month passed. Then, on the morning of April 2, Easter Tuesday, Father Cousineau knocked on the Lamontagnes’ door, holding a letter mailed in New Hampshire. The torn envelope was proof that the priest had already read and translated its contents. Delicious aromas wafted in from the kitchen. Eggs, Father Cousineau was quite certain, and unless he was mistaken, fresh bread, baked beans, cretons, some kind of pork glistening with fat, and a full and generous teapot were standing by. The American girl was at work. He noted happily that everyone in the Lamontagne family appeared to have gained weight, even though Lent had just ended. Well-rounded cheeks, tight clothes, generous bosoms . . . Old Ma Madeleine’s sons and daughters had spent an anti-Lent to which the American cook’s arrival was surely no stranger. The breakfast table had not yet been cleared when Madeleine the American asked the priest to take a seat. “Please, Father . . .” She disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a plate piled high with pancakes, eggs, and slices of ham. All swimming in a half-inch of maple syrup. The priest, a man used to a leaner diet, dug courageously into the mountain of treats that towered before him. The rich food gave him the courage to announce the news he had come to tell the Lamontagne family. While continuing to eat—because, truth be told, he had never tasted pancakes so fluffy, so light, nor ham so tender—he first asked to speak to the American girl alone. The rest of the family piled into the kitchen. Three of the children spilled out onto the lawn to play in the early rays of the April sun.
From the kitchen, the priest’s low voice could be heard as he spoke hesitantly in the English he had learned at the seminary. It went on for some minutes. Then a prayer went up. Next, after a short silence, three sighs from a woman were heard, followed by a sob. Upon hearing the sobs of the woman he so desired, Louis-Benjamin wanted to burst into the dining room and take her in his arms. Old Ma Madeleine looked daggers at him. “You stay put!” she hissed at her excitable son. After a moment’s silence, the girl swept into the kitchen, her face streaming with tears, sobbing uncontrollably. Intrigued, Old Ma Madeleine and her son went over to the priest, who was busily mopping up his yolk with a slice of toast. He wiped his mouth before he spoke.
He had received a letter from the United States, penned in English by the priest in the girl’s parish of Nashua. Shortly after their adoptive daughter’s departure, Alphonse’s family had suffered much misfortune. First, their youngest son had been struck by a terrible fever that no remedy had managed to cool. They realized too late that the boy had, like so many others, contracted the Spanish flu. The boy of twelve was dead within a week. But the Grim Reaper did not stop there. Two days before the boy breathed his last, his mother felt the beginning of the end stir in her throat. Then it was the father’s turn, and he lasted no more than four days. In all, the flu had plundered four members from a family of only seven, including Madeleine. The Spanish flu had left her an orphan again, depriving her of a father and mother for a second time. Of the three children death had spared, two had already left the family home to get married. The remaining daughter had watched death take the home’s occupants one by one, only to find herself alone. The priest was careful to note in his letter that Clarisse, the unfortunate survivor, was now in the care of the nuns of the state of New Hampshire.
“Are there any of those divine pancakes left?” Father Cousineau inquired. “I think there are indeed!” said Old Ma Madeleine, getting up.
Father Cousineau waited until she was in the kitchen before giving Louis-Benjamin a wink. Between two Americans sobs, the sound of utensils in the kitchen reached them. The priest ruffled the young man’s hair.
“So, my boy. If someone asked you to choose between a trip to France and the American girl, what would you do?”
The boy reddened. He looked down at the wooden table, trying to hold back tears with a weak laugh.
“France is real far!” he said.
“Yes, my boy. Much too far,” the priest replied, taking a sip of tea. “And it’s infested with Germans,” he spat.
“We’re Germans too, Father.”
“I know, but that was before the war, long before. Do you remember Germany?”
“No.”
“Your father neither, nor his father before him. It goes all the way back to the eighteenth century. I don’t think there can be much German left in you.”
“Is the eighteenth century far back?”
“As far away as Germany. And if I were you, I’d keep quiet about it,” he concluded.
Old Ma Madeleine set down a second plate in front of the priest, who didn’t even wait for her to take her hand away before he swiped a piece of pancake, voraciously eyeing a slice of ham glistening in the springtime sun. Outside, the gulls’ cries became more piercing, a few chickadees announced better days, and melted snow ran down the streets, comforting those in mourning. The priest chewed noisily enough for Old Ma Madeleine to consider putting a word in the bishop’s ear the next time he visited. Wasn’t the seminary there to teach good manners? With a nod, the priest signalled for Louis-Benjamin to leave the room so that he could speak in private with Old Ma Madeleine. The youngster leaped up to join Madeleine the American in the kitchen while the priest seized the opportunity to swallow an enormous mouthful of ham.
“There was trouble in Quebec City yesterday,” he announced gravely.
“What sort of trouble?”
“The army is looking for young men to conscript, Mrs. Lamontagne. They sent soldiers from Toronto, English-speaking men who opened fire on an unarmed crowd. Five innocents are dead. It won’t be long until they cross the river and come looking up here. They’ll be after Louis-Benjamin. That good-looking son of yours is eighteen years old.”
Old Ma Madeleine sighed. What could any of this have to do with the drama that had been playing since the priest had arrived?
“The girl no longer has a home to go back to,” the priest said.
“Are you asking me to keep her, Father? She doesn’t understand half of what we tell her.”
“The army doesn’t go around taking fathers from their families, Mrs. Lamontagne.”
There was a silence. Old Ma Madeleine looked outside, where two of her daughters were throwing snowballs at Louis-Benjamin’s brother. It seemed to her that only yesterday her oldest boy had been doing exactly the same thing. She smiled.
“Would you like another cup of tea, Father?”
“I wouldn’t be so impolite as to refuse,” he replied.
Truth be told, the priest would have happily taken some more ham, and perhaps a pancake, but he kept quiet, lest the woman take him for a glutton. Old Ma Madeleine stood up to refill the teapot in the kitchen. Walking through the door, she let out a cry.
“Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne!” she exclaimed.
The priest hoisted his 220 pounds up off the chair to see what was going on in the next room with his own eyes. There was Louis-Benjamin on a kitchen stool, holding the American girl by the waist as she sat straddled in his lap. The latter, as brazen as you please, had undone the second button of her suitor’s shirt, and was removing her hand from the boy’s clothing just as the priest’s head appe
ared in the doorway. Blushing with shame, the two children didn’t know where to look. The girl tried to free herself from the embrace of her fiancé who, for reasons only young men understand, reasons directly related to the spring breeze blowing through Fraserville that day, desperately wanted her to screen him for just another minute. He clung to her like a lifebuoy. Then suddenly he was infuriated. He grabbed hold of the girl with the firmness of a cowboy wrangling a heifer.
“I don’t wanna go to France, Ma!” he yelled in a tone Old Ma Madeleine had never heard before.
His mother stood there looking helpless, between the two entwined lovebirds and the priest, whose belly could now be heard rumbling. The priest had looked away from the young couple. He was now eyeing up the breakfast leftovers. He noted with no small amount of interest that there was a pancake on the griddle, untouched and still warm.
“You’re not going to throw that pancake out, are you?” he inquired innocently, pointing a finger at the object of his desire.
It was no time until the two youngsters, who had been only one word short of bliss, were united before God. For the fourth time that year, Father Cousineau sped things up a little, putting an earlier date on the banns, smoothing out the rough edges the hands of the authorities wouldn’t help but feel when they came across a young man still practically beardless but in possession of a marriage certificate. On April 3, 1918, before a sparse audience, Louis-Benjamin and Madeleine the American were pronounced man and wife before Father Cousineau, who was as proud as a peacock.
“That’s another one they won’t get.”
In the whole parish, he knew none finer, none sweeter, than the young Lamontagne boys. The very idea that such a handsome young man would have a bomb dropped on him or, worse still, be sent home an invalid or gassed simply because the king didn’t know how to wage a war, was abhorrent to him. Old Ma Madeleine thought it best to wait until her husband had returned home from the logging camp before doing something so momentous for all concerned, to which the priest retorted that the army spotters could step out of the train at any minute or spring up like jack-in-the-boxes on the road. And once they were in Fraserville, there would be nothing for it but to hide her boys like hens hide their chicks. The priest was thinking that, judging by what he had heard from Louis-Benjamin at confession, the young American girl was about to feel a spring wind blow, the likes of which she had never felt, or at least find reward for all her attentions in the kitchen. With the resignation of the birds, Old Ma Madeleine, sitting stiffly in a pew, shed not a tear, tears not being her forte, and wondered instead how she was going to explain everything to her husband when he came back from the logging camp at winter’s end. Piled in beside her in the freezing-cold church, Louis-Benjamin’s little sisters dozed, stared at the Madonna out of the corner of their eyes, or counted the cotton flowers stitched onto Madeleine the American’s white dress, which had been hastily rented the day before from the Thivierges’ general store, meaning that Old Ma Madeleine had been up part of the night adjusting the waist (much too ample for such a tiny slip of a thing) and ironing her girls’ calico dresses. Her face wan and her head filled with sleep, Old Ma Madeleine entrusted the fate of her oldest son to the hands of God and the wedding photos to Lavoie the photographer.
Their wedding photo—the one that Papa Louis is pointing to with an insistent index finger at this very moment, right beside the photo of Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s twin sister who died in Nagasaki—shows the newlyweds in profile, still almost children, Louis-Benjamin with his cowlick standing straight up in the air and smiling blissfully, perhaps because he was wearing a bow tie for the very first time, perhaps because his dearest wish was going to be realized when he walked out of the photographer’s studio on Rue Lafontaine, which the bridal procession had entered headed up by Old Ma Madeleine, followed by her girls, each in their Sunday best, then the main attraction, the undisputed superstars of this strange Easter carnival. The photographer had them sit very close to each other, close enough for the girl to feel on her neck the breath of the strapping Louis-Benjamin doing his level best not to go mad with happiness. They were like two children dressed up as adults to get a laugh out of their parents. The collar on Louis-Benjamin’s shirt was slightly too big for him, his bow tie almost as broad as his smile. As for the girl, she looked like she’d just been told a risqué joke. The blissfully happy expression that was to mark that day still shone clearly in December 1958 in Papa Louis’s living room, in the soft light of the fringed floor lamp that enveloped with its yellow glow the storyteller, his children, a still-decorated Christmas tree, and, at the back of the adjoining parlor, Sirois in his casket. Little Madeleine felt her brother Marc’s hand under her thigh, a restless, mischievous, reassuring presence.
Her mind swimming back and forth between two distinct worlds, Madeleine took her brother Marc’s hand so as not to lose him, so as not to be ejected from this downy nest confected from Christmas trees, gin, little brothers, and stories of brides arriving by train on a winter evening. She wanted to know how Papa Louis had come into the world, because that’s what he’d promised to tell them: how he had come into the world against all odds that Christmas of 1918. She wanted to hear the story just once, then grow up.
“Hold my hand. I don’t want to fall asleep,” she whispered into Marc’s ear.
As if to celebrate the impromptu wedding of Louis-Benjamin and Madeleine the American, Papa Louis lit a cigarette, twirling it several times before going on with the story. The air in the living room filled with an acrid, carcinogenic smell, lending the room a solemn feel, as though Papa Louis had wanted to show they had moved into the adult world and the story was about to get darker. He closed the door to the parlor where Sirois was resting.
“Cigarettes are bad for the dead—and for the living!”
He slapped his broad thighs. Old Ma Madeleine had set up a bedroom for the newlyweds in her home on Rue Fraserville. What is there to say about Louis-Benjamin other than that his boss, Old Michaud, saw all his wishes come true in the first week after the wedding ceremony. The boy had rediscovered his composure and constantly wore a little smile, the one he was known for before the American arrived. In Old Michaud’s workshop, he carved and sanded down one little cradle after the other. His young wife had been caught throwing up into a wooden pail one morning, looking gloomy and preoccupied. In the meantime, Vilmaire Lamontagne, Louis-Benjamin’s father, had returned home from logging over the winter to find his son married to an American. He had arrived back one rainy afternoon to a deserted house. Alone in the kitchen, a young lady was busy preparing rabbits. Vilmaire asked what she was doing in his kitchen. The stranger put down the carcass, rinsed her hands, and tried to sum up in her stilted French the events of the previous weeks. He looked at his daughter-in-law, perplexed and a little worried. The newcomer served him a bowl of hearty stew and a mug of tea. Tired after his long journey, he chewed on his meal as he looked the young woman over. Little Louis-Benjamin married? Where had his wife gotten to? And the girls? All these questions were answered after a long nap when the rest of the family came back from yard work at a cousin’s house. When it was confirmed to him that his son was indeed married, Vilmaire Lamontagne smiled, looked the American up and down, and lifted her up off the ground as though checking her worth in weight.
“You’re my daughter now.”
The summer went by in a state of bliss that was barely interrupted by the pregnancy troubles of the young wife, who substantially increased in volume. On the days her husband received his pay, she would be seen wearily dragging herself back up Rue Lafontaine from the stores. Louis, for his part, had been thrust by his father into the world of woodwork. A similar-looking home was built beside his father’s because they were starting to get under each other’s feet. That September, Father Cousineau started putting in appearances again with the family. They had long since understood that the man had to be fed regularly, if only to express their gratitude to him for having spared Louis-Benjami
n a senseless death at Verdun or Vimy. Father Cousineau rather enjoyed being in a dining room teeming with snot-nosed children. The Lamontagne home was a place of comfort, a refuge that allowed him to escape, if only briefly, the cold, impersonal surroundings of the presbytery. On such evenings, he was especially fond of recalling his days at the Rimouski seminary for the Lamontagnes. He had been ordained there, hailing from the nearby Matapédia Valley as he did. He spoke of the camaraderie among the seminarists, without, of course, going into all the details of the special friendships that tended to flourish.
Ten years before being sent to the parish of Saint-François-Xavier in Fraserville, Father Cousineau had belonged to the seminary’s theater troupe, where he had spent his happiest hours. Aside from the pleasure he felt performing scenes from Lives of the Saints or the New Testament, Cousineau really came into his own making sets and costumes. People in Rimouski still remembered the grandiose outfit he had made himself to play King Charles VII in The Maid of Orleans, a pious drama penned by two Brothers of the Holy Cross in 1882 that paid tribute to the victorious king who had managed to rid France of the English plague. For his court costume, young Cousineau had made himself a magnificent doublet from maroon felt, trimmed around the collar and sleeves with fox fur he had begged one of his aunts for. A talented couturier and designer with a keen fashion sense, he hadn’t stopped there: he had also made himself a large black hat with a broad brim upon which he had painstakingly embroidered the white lines that make up the starred pattern of that particular historical headpiece. He drew much of his inspiration from a portrait of the French sovereign that appeared in Lives of the Saints and even went so far as to wear old-fashioned stockings—borrowed from the same aunt who had loaned him the fox fur—under the salmon-pink petticoat breeches that made him vaguely resemble a peony and, the one and only anachronism in his otherwise wholly convincing attire, Charles IX shoes that had also served the year before when the senior students had put on Le Malade imaginaire.
