by Eric Dupont
“You have to push, Madeleine!” someone shouted from the third row, even though the American had understood well enough that the nun was also a midwife and that she was going to give birth on this pile of straw. Powerful contractions rocked her body. Joseph had regained his courage and rested his wife’s head on his broad chest. On a nun’s orders, the congregation broke into a rosary.
“The rosary!” the nun cried, brandishing her beads.
And the prayers went up, forming a musical backdrop that was occasionally interrupted by a shriek from the woman in labor. Sister Mary of the Eucharist felt the mother’s belly, as though searching for something. She looked contrite and disapproving. A full hour of intense labor went by, while the prayers continued in the pews. The American appeared exhausted. Half opening a frightened eye, she flattened her hands in the straw and moaned miserably.
“The baby’s facing the wrong way. When was the last time he moved?” she asked the American, who was suffering too much to reply. “This child should have been turned three days ago!” the nun shouted, lubricating her hand with a greasy substance a fellow nun held out to her. “Madeleine, I’m going to have to put my hand inside you to turn the child. It’s not facing the right way at all.”
Sister Mary of the Eucharist slowly put her hand up into the American’s dilated vagina. A flood of amniotic fluid cascaded out onto the straw. A man sitting in the third row fainted. Madeleine screamed blue murder. “Push,” the nun shouted. She removed her hand from deep inside Madeleine, who, her mouth wide open, was now begging to be put out of her misery. From time to time, she would crane her neck to glance down at the nun who was helping her bring her child into the world, only to let out a cry of terror at the sight of her hideous face.
“Try to calm her down!” the nun hissed at the father.
Louis-Benjamin sang into his wife’s ear the only English song he knew: Will you love me all the time? The song did seem to soothe her a little, and there was almost the hint of a smile on her lips. Sister Mary of the Eucharist seemed quite irritated.
“Madeleine, you have to push. Push as hard as you can!”
The congregation held its breath; the little angels sobbed in the pulpit; the women who had given birth themselves felt Madeleine the American’s pain as their own. The men did their best not to rest their eyes on the terrible scene. Madeleine wasn’t making it easy for them: she wouldn’t stop screaming. Suddenly a terrible spasm went through her body and her piercing yell gave way to a thin, reedy sound, a pianissimo con forza howl that shattered Louis-Benjamin’s eardrums. Sister Mary of the Eucharist shook her head. A small, grey arm could now be seen between the American’s legs. The child had chosen this position to be born into the world, but that seemed the least of Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s worries.
“The child has been dead for a while. Now we must try to save the mother.”
Sister Mary of the Eucharist leaped up and ran to the sacristy, where she lived with the other nuns. She reemerged after a minute armed with a peculiar instrument. It looked like a pair of metal pliers, glistening like a jewel in the half-light. The nun ran a determined hand along the little dead arm and pushed her own arm in until she could feel the whole child in its mother’s womb. The maneuver caused a terrible ripping and tearing, and the American began to bleed profusely. The smell of excrement mixed with the scent of the Christmas candles. The nun’s bony fingers found the child’s neck and gripped it firmly. Then, very carefully, with her right hand she picked up the instrument she had brought from the sacristy.
“What is that?” Louis-Benjamin gasped.
“Forceps. We use them to turn and extract babies when they are being born. Madeleine, I’m going to use this instrument to get your baby out. Don’t be afraid. I use them all the time. It’s absolutely normal. Even kings and princesses are delivered using forceps.”
The nun inserted the forceps into Madeleine’s body, found the dead child’s head, and caught hold of it. Then she waited for the next contraction to pull the baby from its mother’s belly.
“Push, Madeleine! Push!”
Resistance was spongy and strong. The baby’s head, spattered with mucus and blood, appeared, lodged between the forceps’ metallic arms. In front of the traumatized onlookers, the nun managed, with a painful grunt, to extract the dead child from the body of its mother who, after arching violently, had fallen onto her back, exhausted from the pain. Madeleine’s wounds continued to bleed horribly, despite the nun’s efforts to contain the hemorrhage. Someone in the congregation began to vomit noisily. The nun looked up at the ceiling, wondering which saint to turn to next. She motioned for Father Cousineau to come forward. She spoke softly into his ear. The priest nodded twice, then knelt down beside the American to give her the last rites. Every gaze followed the same trajectory, tracing a triangle from the dead child, then to Madeleine, before falling inevitably back to Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s sad, frightful face. As soon as it was extracted from its mother’s body, the child was laid on the straw. All eyes were now on the tiny, stiff, greyish-white form, its eyes closed.
“It was a girl,” someone said.
Hands covered in mucus and blood, the nun had her eyes locked on the mother’s open belly, still shaken by contractions. The audience was stunned. Moments before the birth, some had made a break for the jube, clambering up the stairs four at a time to find refuge and escape the gaze of the American and the priest, trying to forget they had ever been witness to the scene. Up above, Louis-Benjamin’s little sisters sobbed in each other’s arms. Two women tried to console them.
“Your brother will have other children. Hush now. Let us pray to the Lord.”
A man stood with his hands over his ears, trying to block out the prayers and the shouting. Of all those the storm had trapped inside the church of Saint-François-Xavier that Christmas night, very few escaped without lasting psychological damage. The parishioners huddled together in the jube tried to strike up a conversation that would have distanced them, in mind if not in body, from this cursed place. But even from up there, any escape from the terrible racket that followed was impossible. After five minutes when nothing but crying, sobbing, and the voices of the obstinate few who persisted with the rosary could be heard, a cry of unprecedented force rang out in the church. The American’s body had started to convulse once again, as the nun held her legs apart. The nun appeared to be no longer aware of anything else around her.
“Jesusmaryandjoseph!” she gasped.
A tiny foot could be seen kicking the American’s still-enormous belly. This one was very much alive, and apparently demanding their attention.
“Madeleine! Madeleine! You need to push! Push harder!”
The American had no strength left. She tried to contract her muscles one last time. The nun plunged her arm back inside her to grab hold of the living child and waited again, patiently, for the last contraction to come. By this point, all life seemed to have abandoned the mother’s body. She was now breathing only feebly to the sound of the prayers mumbled by Father Cousineau. And yet, something in her was still alive: the second child whose existence she had only just learned of.
“Madeleine, push . . .” murmured Louis-Benjamin.
Then Madeleine pushed, slowly and painfully, helped by Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who had a firm grip on the second child’s head. A cry tore through the church. “She’s having another! And this one’s alive!” Every head, which out of respect for the stillborn child had been bowed, suddenly rose again. A drumming of feet could be heard from those who had sought refuge from the horror in the jube and were now racing back down the stairs to see the miracle for themselves. Kneeling on the blood-soaked straw, Sister Mary of the Eucharist, herself dumbfounded at the turn of events, struggled to pull the second child out of the American. From the front rows, people had already seen the child’s huge head emerge, then its shoulders and pelvis, and last of all its tiny feet. Pale pink in color, the baby was already moving its arms, as though to re
assure everyone of its health. Sister Mary of the Eucharist patted it on the back a few times, holding it by the feet. A subdued, somber, sinister silence fell over the congregation. The little one’s birth had been a total surprise, but there were already very precise though modest hopes for him: that he let out a cry. They waited another five seconds, then Papa Louis’s voice was heard for the first time, strong, clear, and resonant, immediately followed by one “Thanks be to God” after another, ending the very short period of mourning in memory of his twin sister.
In Louis-Benjamin’s lap, the American showed no signs of life. Her face, glistening in pallor, was even whiter than the statue of the Madonna. An inverse Pietà, the couple was no longer of interest to anyone. Madeleine had passed away in the arms of Louis-Benjamin, who had tenderly closed her eyes. Attention now turned to the child, to the huge baby wailing at the top of its lungs, turning its head right and left like an old man in the throes of a nightmare. “It’s a boy!” Old Ma Madeleine cried from the pew where she was sitting, rosary beads still in hand. Beneath the wooden shelter, Sister Mary of the Eucharist passed the child to his father, whose arms trembled as he reached out. The American’s head fell back against the floor with a dull thud. The nun leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. Before moving away, discreetly, quickly, furtively, she removed the gold chain and little cross that Louis-Benjamin had given her for her birthday on the feast of St. John the Baptist. The piece of jewelry disappeared into the folds of her voluminous habit.
Two or three hours after the child was born, the wind ceased battering Fraserville. Everyone took the opportunity to go home. Madeleine the American and her stillborn child could not be buried right away, so their caskets were stored for the winter at the charnel house. It was only in spring, once the ground had thawed, that mother and baby were buried. Old Ma Madeleine searched high and low for the little cross the deceased had been given as a gift by her husband. But she could not find it anywhere. She asked all those present at the scene, even Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who claimed never to have set eyes on it.
“She should be buried with her little cross,” Old Ma Madeleine sighed in vain.
The Fraserville undertaker engraved Madeleine Lamontagne (The American) on her tombstone, which was solidly planted in the ground that spring at a funeral ceremony Louis-Benjamin did not attend, since on March 1, 1919, one year to the day after Madeleine the American first arrived in Fraserville, his body was found in the Rivière du Loup, at the foot of the waterfall where he had thrown himself to his death, inconsolable, desperate. He was given the burial reserved for those who chose death over life, interred in a small, separate cemetery, far from the mortal remains of Madeleine the American, who, having died of natural causes, had been given a Christian burial. The child was baptized Joseph-Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne on the very day of his birth, but his grandmother, Old Ma Madeleine, always called him Louis, and raised him alongside her remaining five children.
Of the American there remained only a handful of objects: items of clothing, a prayer book, wedding photos, and The New England Cookbook, which the young woman had had in her bags the day she arrived in Fraserville and which Old Ma Madeleine did not have the heart to throw out, and which she could not make out a word of in any case. She packed all the items away in boxes and had her son Napoleon drop them off at the Sisters of the Child Jesus to be given to those in need.
Louis was an unusually robust boy. At birth, he already weighed twelve pounds, a very respectable weight for a boy born in 1918, and a twin to boot. By the time Fraserville had calmed down, by the time Old Ma Madeleine had mourned her daughter-in-law, and then her son, it was spring of 1919, the first year of peacetime after a long war. Father Cousineau had lost the pounds he had put on during the American’s brief stay in Fraserville. Old Ma Madeleine did not really know what she should tell the child. The people of Fraserville would no doubt take care of that for her soon enough. There was always a doubt at the back of her mind; she was suspicious of a boy who was too big and would eat enough for two, already managing to sit up by himself barely a few weeks after he was born. Nonetheless, Old Ma Madeleine had other things to be worried about. One day in June, after the American’s funeral, she insisted on meeting Father Cousineau alone at the presbytery with the child. She wanted, she said, to ask his opinion on a matter concerning the baby. Nothing serious, just a nagging doubt, a question sparked by that sixth sense somewhere between the heart and the mind that serves neither to think nor to love, but that allows a woman to feel rightfully worried.
The priest was only too happy to meet her.
And so Old Ma Madeleine arrived at the presbytery the following day with the child she had difficulty carrying and who was already demanding to be fed even though he had eaten barely twenty minutes earlier. Strangely, the baby stopped bawling as soon as the priest took him in his arms.
“How may I be of assistance, Madeleine?”
By way of reply, Old Ma Madeleine took the child, set him down on the table, and began undressing him. Once he was wearing nothing more than a cotton diaper and babbling ga-ga-gaa, the priest repeated his question.
“The child seems perfectly normal to me,” he added. “A little hefty for such a young thing, but when you think of so many other children being born all sickly and skinny, it’s nice to see one so robust! He’ll be a strong man, your Louis!”
The priest gently pinched the child’s plump thighs between his thumb and index finger as Louis smiled, revealing what looked like a tooth on its way. Old Ma Madeleine sighed and undressed the child completely to show him to Father Cousineau as God intended. She pointed between little Louis’s legs. Father Cousineau squinted, then put on his spectacles, because he was rather far-sighted. His jaw dropped. There was a moment of silence, then he looked Old Ma Madeleine in the eye and muttered: “May God preserve it for him!”
In the living room on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, Papa Louis’s impression of Father Cousineau had the children rolling about laughing.
“And then in 1919, Fraserville became Rivière-du-Loup,” he went on. “Officially, I’m as old as our town! You children should know that!” he said, finishing his fourth gin of the evening.
In the meantime, Madeleine and Marc had undressed their brother Luc. He was already sound asleep. He barely made a sound when his sister Madeleine slipped his undershirt off. Then they pulled their pants down and inspected each other. Madeleine buried her face in her hands in shame.
“Papa Louis! I don’t have one!” Marc lamented.
“Not all three of you have one,” Papa Louis responded. “Only your sister and your little brother.”
They all gathered around Luc first, still asleep on the sofa. An inch above his ankle, he had a small birthmark about the size of a dime and shaped somewhat like a bass clef.
“What is it?” he asked, waking at last.
“A bass clef,” replied Papa Louis. “It’s for writing music on staves.”
The children looked at it, wide eyed. In their excitement they hadn’t heard their mother Irene return home from the convent. This was how she found them, bedtime long since passed, Papa Louis tipsy, Luc stark naked, Madeleine and Marc with their pants down. Too late, they turned to see her, standing fuming at the living-room door. If it is possible to describe such an expression in words, it could be said Irene had the end of the world written all over her face. In a flash, she grabbed her pantsless son by the scruff of the neck and marched him upstairs to his bedroom. Without a word—just a look—she picked up Luc and ordered Madeleine up the stairs, where she closed the door to her daughter’s bedroom and told her in no uncertain terms to go to sleep.
“We’ll talk about all this tomorrow.”
In a dream, half awake, little Madeleine could hear her mother’s shouts rising from the living room. The glass thrown against the wall shattering into pieces. A “Christ Almighty!” from Papa Louis. The dull thud of a woman’s body flung against a wooden floor. Once. Twice. Then silence. The sou
nd of water running. In the parlor, Sirois’s body went on decaying to general indifference.
The dead mind their own business.
A Black Eye is Watching You
YEARS BEFORE A journalist dubbed her the “Queen of Breakfast” at the opening of one of her restaurants in a Toronto suburb, Madeleine had been a little girl almost like any other. Lots of people could have told you that, people like Siegfried Zucker, a kind of door-to-door salesman who once a month traveled the length and breadth of the Lower St. Lawrence in a truck chock-full of foodstuffs that he hawked at knock-down prices that could be knocked down even further if you were ready to bargain. Zucker, an Austrian who came to Canada after the war, had decided to make the Lamontagne home the last stop of the day. He was always welcomed by Irene Caron, a hardened negotiator, and her little girl, Madeleine. It was probably the Austrian who first picked up on Madeleine’s nose for business. When she was eight, Zucker once offered Madeleine a barley sugar lollipop in the shape of a maple leaf. They were standing outside on the steps while her mother carried what she’d bought into the kitchen.
“Can I have one for my brother Marc?”
“Why of course!” Zucker replied, handing over a second candy.
When Zucker came to deliver Irene Caron’s order the following month, there was no sign of little Madeleine. Instead, he found her brother Marc playing on the porch with a cat. The boy thanked him for the previous month’s lollipop.
“At that price, you’re practically giving them away!” he laughed to Zucker, who realized that Madeleine had sold the candy to her brother.
Far from being shocked, Zucker developed an instant fondness for Madeleine. In some ways, she became his favorite customer. He would often haggle with her over imaginary wares, testing the child’s perspicacity, and she never let him down. Madeleine in turn grew fond of the man she came to associate with abundance, profit, and barley sugar.
