by Eric Dupont
“You know my grandson, Louis . . .”
“Yes, I saw him at the parade. Did you know he pushed little St. John the Baptist’s cart all the way up Rue Lafontaine? He’s such a strong man!”
“I know all that. My Louis would like to invite you ’round for supper with us tomorrow night. Will you accept, Miss Caron?”
“Tomorrow night? No thank you. I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“The supper won’t cost you a cent,” the old woman insisted, well aware of the Carons’ legendary penny-pinching.
Irene hesitated. Louis stared at the ground, embarrassed. He wasn’t a shy man, but he didn’t want to give the impression that, no sooner back in the country, he was already laying claim to all the best-looking girls, playing the role of conquering hero. That’s why he had asked his grandmother to invite Irene over.
“No, thank you. I can’t.”
Louis went back home a little irritated. Old Ma Madeleine was gloating silently as old women know how. Not only had heaven above removed the specter of her finding herself with the Caron girl underfoot, now no one could ever accuse her of sabotaging the marriage. Madeleine couldn’t have cared less about the reasons that had led the hateful, insidious child to turn down an invitation to have supper with the most eligible bachelor in the entire history of Rivière-du-Loup and probably the whole Lower St. Lawrence region too. Louis was wondering where he had gone wrong, whether he smelled bad or whether Irene had been put off by his moustache. More aggrieved than saddened, it was his pride that had been wounded more than his heart.
The following Sunday brought Louis a fresh helping of humiliation, giving Old Ma Madeleine new reasons to sing the Lord’s praises. Irene came to mass with her entire family in tow (minus Armand), accompanied by a stranger from the parish of Saint-Ludger, a scabby, scrawny, foul-mouthed little man who, to the parishioners of Saint-François-Xavier, was nothing more than a walking eyesore. A handful of gossips saw right through the Caron woman’s game. Because that’s what she was called and what she’s still called to this day in the parish of Saint-François-Xavier: the Caron woman. The poor fellow was nothing more than a flimsy alibi, a puppet who was only there to up the ante. As for the Caron woman, the men and women of Saint-François-Xavier parish shot her the same distrustful, frightened look a philanderer reserves for a venereal sore.
To give young Louis pause for thought, that Sunday Irene wore a magnificent hat. It had been loaned to her by a neighbor in an effort to seal her lips about an embarrassing affair. She was even vulgar enough to introduce her companion to Louis and Old Ma Madeleine, as calm as a picture of Good Saint Anne.
“They’re a perfect match,” Madeleine hissed scornfully as soon as Irene had turned on her heels. “They can go back to their own parish and live happily ever after!”
It had indeed been strange to see Irene, a child of Saint-Ludger, at mass in Saint-François. And if the church steps could repeat what they’d heard in that summer of 1948 . . .
“If she’s only out to thumb her nose at our handsome Louis, why doesn’t she just stay home?”
“Yeah. Why else would he come back if not to marry a girl from the parish? Come on! And who could possibly imagine a Lamontagne-Caron union?”
No, no, no, and no. They shook their heads. They laughed. A Lamontagne marrying a Caron seemed as improbable in the eyes of the gossips of Rivière-du-Loup as the King of England wedding a bullfrog, the bullfrog being, due to its aggressive, territorial nature, naturally associated with Irene.
Others scarcely bothered to conceal their spite as they pointed out Irene’s little game. Others still remarked that there’s no mixing maple syrup and vinegar, leaving it up to whoever they were talking to to decide which of the two was the maple syrup.
And what about Louis? Did he lose any of his panache? Did he keep his own counsel? That summer, at a corn roast, which virtually the entire parish of Saint-François had been invited to, Louis began, to everyone’s great delight, telling stories again. And he had plenty to tell! His tales of Idaho Bill and The Warsaw Giant alone lasted an hour. And he no longer needed an interpreter: his audience understood his every word! Poor old Podgórski had his hour of glory as the sun set over Rivière-du-Loup, the moment Louis chose to describe how the cross-eyed Pole had met his tragic end.
Solange’s parents and older sister happened to be at the party as Louis, perched on a wooden crate, explained and mimed exactly how he had gotten the better of Adolf the bull calf and saved two poor American girls from a terrible end. His stories were picked up, transformed, and performed again, just like any other story in Rivière-du-Loup. It was Solange’s mother who told her the story from the corn roast over at Louis Lamontagne’s place in 1948, out the back of Old Ma Madeleine’s house. According to Mrs. Bérubé, Irene wasn’t even invited. She’d just shown up, as innocent as could be. Also according to Mrs. Bérubé’s version of the facts, Irene arrived just as Louis was wrapping up the story of poor Podgórski’s (she’d called him Podborovich) tragic demise. The sadness that washed over the party gave way to the natural disdain inspired by Irene Caron. Cool and supreme, Irene apparently went over to sit on a bale of hay that was part of the decorations. Upon spotting the uninvited guest, a mightily piqued Old Ma Madeleine went straight back into the house. The gossip later told her daughter how Louis had saved the day by rousing the musicians he had hired for the occasion. He had danced the night away with every woman there, apart from Irene that is, who didn’t budge from the bale of hay, nibbling away on her corn.
“The Caron woman’s so miserly, we were surprised she didn’t eat the whole thing, cob and all.”
On the stroke of midnight, when the partygoers had forgotten her, Irene Caron disappeared, like a devil of legend.
Solange’s mother had, of course, added a detail or two of her own to the corn roast story. Fact: Irene turned up uninvited. Proven fact: Louis looked sad when he saw her arrive. Reality: When she saw the uninvited guest, Old Ma Madeleine stormed back into the house, slamming the door behind her. Rectification: Irene actually ate two cobs of corn and slipped a third into her purse. Correction: Handsome young Louis only danced with nine of the twelve women present. Detail: The Caron woman left the roast well before midnight to make it home in time for curfew. What is no lie, though, is that the next morning Louis was dreadfully hungover, and Irene Caron had become his one and only obsession, his woe, his personal disaster zone. Never before had Louis’s charms encountered any resistance. Even the women of conquered lands where he had been to war had welcomed him like a prince. Hadn’t he just been sent a passionate letter from a splendid, voluptuous Fräulein he’d encountered in Bavaria? Wann kommen Sie wieder, Louis? When will you return, Louis? The last time he had met with such stubborn resistance had been in Gouverneur, New York, and it had come from a beast with four legs and a tail.
In August 1948, Louis, determined to stay in shape, had a set of dumbbells and weights delivered, the like of which his neighbors had never seen. To show that Caron woman what he was made of, he bought a forest-green Chrysler Windsor, which he liked to drive up and down Rue Lafontaine, even all the way to the parish of Saint-Ludger. He quickly became the unofficial driver for the Sisters of the Child Jesus, who had always considered him to be their own darling. Truth be told, Louis felt that having the nuns on his side would help him win over the recalcitrant Irene’s heart more easily. And so he drove the nuns everywhere. To Cacouna so they could wade in the river, out to the peat bogs to pick blueberries, and even to Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière to visit His Grace.
Solange never found out exactly, at least not from her mother, when and how Louis and Irene started going steady. Rumor had it the two had been spotted out walking at the Point and then by the lake in the first week of September 1948. Then came the morning in November 1948 that Old Ma Madeleine had dreaded—the dead can feel that kind of thing coming—the morning when Irene Caron showed up at the Lamontagnes’ house, flanked by her mother.
It was
not a good sign.
“Louis, my poor Louis, now you’re in a fix!”
Old Ma Madeleine would happily have strangled the two women. They sat in glum silence in the living room. Mrs. Caron, still straight enough for her age, held her cup of tea with a perhaps too-confident hand. Louis stared at the floor. Barely a word was exchanged. They would have to be quick about it.
“Yes, before the snow,” snapped Mrs. Caron.
And the clock went tick-tock. It chimed ten. Irene held Old Ma Madeleine’s gaze, but the old woman wasn’t about to back down. She would have rather died a second time than go through this. The Caron woman and her mother talked numbers for ten or fifteen minutes. What this and that were going to cost. Who should be invited. Where. What to wear. Old Ma Madeleine decided there and then she would be wearing dark grey and looking as dead as could be. And so it happened, in the church of Saint-François. Irene was Louis Lamontagne’s first and last conquest, in the strictest sense of the word. Which just goes to show it can sometimes be less dangerous being the hunted than the hunter. You never know what you might catch.
“Try to make sure your children don’t turn out like her.”
That was how Old Ma Madeleine blessed Louis Lamontagne’s marriage to Irene Caron, the undesirable young woman of easy virtue from the parish of Saint-Ludger.
“And if you think that Caron woman didn’t know what she was up to, Solange, then you’re just as naive as that poor father of yours!”
In Rivière-du-Loup, Louis and Irene’s wedding might as well have been a funeral. And so died hope in the heart of every woman. And so was born everlasting resentment toward that Caron woman from Saint-Ludger. Even Louis’s rivals, the men who envied everything he had—his strength, his good looks, his bravery, his moustache, his Chrysler Windsor, his house, his money, his stories, and his songs—even they pitied him. And it was with not a hint of irony that they sent him, anonymously of course, gallons upon gallons of gin in which to drown his sorrows and ready himself for the days ahead.
“I’m telling you, Solange, she wasn’t from this parish. You need to get that into your head! From Saint-Ludger, she was. We’d never have believed it. Poor, poor Louis!”
Mrs. Bérubé pointed over to the Lamontagne house. Things had moved along very quickly. It was agreed that Old Ma Madeleine would move in with the newlyweds and, despite its vocation as a funeral parlor, all of Louis Lamontagne’s children were born in that home. Madeleine was born on June 6, 1950, three months after Solange Bérubé. But the Caron woman wasn’t done yet. Marc followed in 1951. Then, in 1953, Irene gave birth to Luc, a frail, sickly child whose first five years of existence were a litany of fevers, coughing fits, diarrhea, and ear infections.
She named the boys after the Evangelists to please Father Rossignol, the poor things . . .
Now let it be said and understood that Mrs. Bérubé in no way felt she was gossiping, merely doing her daughter a good turn with a series of warnings that would in any case soon be part of the education of every little girl in the parish of Saint-François-Xavier. Louis’s story served as a cautionary tale to the young folk of Rivière-du-Loup, right up there with Maliseet legends and priests cautioning against listening to music on the radio.
“You’re putting your souls in peril!”
But none of these stories prevented Louis Lamontagne from making a living with the dead. The parish gossips can say what they like, but never was a business in Rivière-du-Loup better managed than the undertaker’s. Irene Caron might not have been the life and soul of the party, but she turned out to be a hard worker. She had a face like a wet weekend, which served her well at the wakes that were held almost every evening in one of the house’s three large parlors. Two vehicles were permanently parked in the driveway: a hearse and a Chrysler Windsor. In what was Solange’s earliest memory, a convertible was soon added to the collection. By the age of four she was already in the habit of spying on the Lamontagne household, their comings and goings, the countless bereaved traipsing up and down their front steps, shouts from the Caron woman, always scandalized by the price of something or other, Old Ma Madeleine walking back and forth across the veranda, the perfect welcoming committee for the families of the deceased.
Louis and Irene had set up a parlor where friends and family could sit waiting for the prayers to begin or chat over coffee that Irene served them with cookies. Old Ma Madeleine never missed a funeral and became the key to Louis’s success. She had endless reserves of patience when questioned by grief-stricken relatives about crossing the great divide. Is it painful? No more than giving birth. Do you really see a light at the end of the tunnel? No, not a thing, especially not at night. Is it true you hear a choir of angels? Unless you die in the middle of mass like my first daughter-in-law, no. Would you be prepared to die a second time? Naturally. Go ahead and die in peace! I loved it. I’d recommend it to anyone, but everything in its time. What advice would she give those who had just lost a loved one? Pray. Pray for the salvation of their soul, give thanks to the Blessed Virgin, and take communion regularly.
The competing undertaker on Rue Lafontaine was none too keen on the strongman’s arrival on the funeral parlor scene, accusing Louis of exploiting a dead grandmother, an unfair advantage if ever there was one. But the customers came. To lie in repose at Louis Lamontagne’s became a not-to-be-missed rite of passage for the deceased in the know. Louis’s affordable prices helped many a Rivière-du-Loup family hold a wake outside the home for the first time, an unattainable indulgence for most before 1945, and proof that the war had well and truly changed people’s approach to death. A significant chunk of the population, made up of skilled workers, salaried employees, and storekeepers, suddenly realized that the treatment once reserved for the better off was now within their reach too.
But who exactly was Louis burying? Who was he laying his powerful hands on? Those whose bodies ended up at Louis’s tended to be followers of fashion. They often owned a radio and record player and were fond of American music. Louis’s corpses went to the movies, rarely went to confession, and had—for the most part—experienced heartbreak at some point. In wealthy families, many a slap was handed out by mothers to sons who, looking to provoke their parents, declared over supper that they wanted to lie in repose at Louis Lamontagne’s once they died.
“Over my dead body! Do you hear me? Never!”
Notaries, doctors, priests, and other worthies never ended up at Louis’s, because this well-heeled clientele went to the competition instead, a gentleman by the name of Quévillon whose legendary inflexibility over payment and generally sullen mood discouraged more humble folk from visiting his establishment. As for the nuns, well, they buried themselves when the time came, without bothering a soul. Young widows could also be seen making funeral arrangements with Louis. One way or another, they’d end up in Louis’s arms, they told their closest confidants. Perhaps not in this world, no, but who on earth gets everything they desire? Louis’s clients also included men with a thirst for adventure, meaning that his parlor was the scene on more than one occasion of embarrassing revelations, a place where wives would come face to face with improbable lovers who insisted on being allowed to pay their last respects to their beloved. How many scenes of rage and anger had he had to defuse whenever there arrived, behind a black veil, a woman whose existence had long been suspected but whose boldness had been underestimated? Louis would beg them to show respect for the dead, calming the hotter heads, and often—once a strongman, always a strongman—throwing out a young cock of the walk whom death had left cuckold. It’s also said—and no one, neither Louis nor his wife, would have denied it—that men who were fond of a drink preferred to go out on one last bier over at Louis’s. This was another not inconsiderable clientele he had made his own.
Much to his wife’s dismay, Louis’s prices were slightly cheaper than his competitors’ and he would offer to pick up bodies free of charge, no matter the hour, day or night. You only had to call or knock on his door. Louis w
as flexible as far as money was concerned, too, and would certainly have gone bankrupt in his first year had it not been for Irene Caron’s gift for arithmetic and her tendency to suggest oak over pine, silk instead of wool, and insist on the need to give distant relatives time to come pay their respects to the dead. The longer the body lay in the parlor, the higher the fees. What did it matter if Irene had to put up with a few irksome odors around the house for a while! When you make a living off death, some things don’t affect you quite the same way.
Old Ma Madeleine almost always sat with visitors at the second parlor for the wake, the body dressed and coiffed according to the family’s means and the talents of her daughter-in-law. She liked to leave a white carnation in men’s buttonholes. For the children called back by God, Irene always managed to get her hands on a few white flowers, whatever the season. It was Old Madeleine who would lead off the rounds of prayers and novenas. Sometimes, if you rubbed her the right way, she might even chant a few forgotten prayers for the dead herself and even, on days when she was feeling in particularly fine fettle, openly weep for people she knew only by name. To be sure, Louis and Irene were terribly indebted to Old Ma Madeleine. Which meant that Louis didn’t have to badger his wife for very long to ensure his only daughter would be christened Madeleine.
And so Solange found herself sitting next to Madeleine in Grade 1A, right in front of Sister Saint Arsenius, who had been keeping her distance since the incident at the start of term. Other little girls made up the rest of the class in their immaculate blouses, sixty braids hanging on either side of thirty heads that were filled with prayers, hymns, and questions to which there were no answers. Sister Saint Arsenius regularly lost control of the class, and it was for this very reason that she had been put in charge of the youngest girls, who were presumed easier to manage. If Mother Mary of the Great Power, Mother Superior and principal of Saint-François-Xavier School, was to be believed, the older girls would have eaten Sister Saint Arsenius alive.
