La Guerre:Yes Sir

by Roch Carrier

  Henri was undressed now. Rather bored by this tenderness and curious to see the village, he went to the window and pulled aside the curtain. The glass was covered with frost. He brought his mouth close to it and breathed out a long breath. Under the warmth of his breath the frost melted a little. Then Henri scratched with his fingernail.

  “Henri!” begged Amélie, impatient.

  He continued to scratch the frost until he could see. He stuck his eye into the little hole. Who was coming up the road?

  “Amélie, there’s something in the road.”

  If you don’t come here Henri, I’ll get mad.” Amélie, in her bed, was worked up. Henri continued to scratch at the frost. “Come see what I see, Amelie.” “Henri, if you don’t come and get on top of me right now it’ll be a long time before you put your behind in my sheets.”

  “Come here, I tell you.”

  Persuaded by his insistence, Amélie got up and went to the window. Henri gave her his observation post. She looked for a long time, then drew back. Henri looked again.

  A soldier was holding a bugle at the end of his arm, which was stretched out horizontally. A coffin followed behind him, carried by six other soldiers and enveloped in a flag. A woman in a white wedding gown was escorting the coffin. The cortege ended with the boys of the village who were marching solemnly along with it, their hockey sticks on their shoulders.

  They passed in front of Amélie’s house and disappeared towards the other end of the village.

  “It’s Corriveau,” said Henri.

  “Yes, it’s Corriveau coming home.”

  Amélie returned to lie down on her bed. Her husband accompanied her.

  Their embrace became more and more violent, and, for a moment, without their daring to admit it, they loved one another.

  The door was narrow. It wasn’t easy to bring the coffin into the house. The soldiers were very embarrassed not to be able to keep the symmetry of their movements. The door of the Corriveaus’ little house had not been built to accommodate a coffin. The bearers put it down in the snow, calculated at what angle it could pass, studied how they should arrange themselves around it, argued. Finally the sergeant gave an order; they picked up the heavy coffin again, inclined it, placed it almost on edge, made themselves as narrow as possible, and finally succeeded in entering, out of breath and exhausted.

  “Leave it now,” grumbled old man Corriveau. “It’s enough that he’s dead, you don’t have to swing him around like that.”

  The door opened into the kitchen. In the middle was a big wooden table.

  “Put him there,” said Mother Corriveau, “on the table. And put his head here, at this end. It’s his place. Like that he’ll feel more at home.”

  The English soldiers didn’t understand the language the old people were speaking. They knew it was French, but they had rarely heard it.

  “On the table!” repeated Mr. Corriveau.

  The carriers put the coffin back on their shoulders and looked around for a place to put it.

  “On the table!” ordered Mother Corriveau.

  The Anglais shrugged their shoulders to show that they did not understand. Mr. Corriveau was getting angry. He said, very loud, “On the table! We want him on the table!”

  The sergeant smiled. He had understood. He gave a command. The obedient soliders turned towards the door: they were going to take the coffin outside.

  Mr. Corriveau ran to the door and spread his arms to block their passage. “Vieux pape de Christ! They come and take him by force, they get him killed without asking our permission, and now we’re going to have to use our fists to get him back from them.” The old man, red with anger, threatened the sergeant with his fist; the latter wondered why everyone didn’t speak English like he did.

  “Vieux pape de Christ !”

  “Put it on the table,” said Molly in English. She had come in after carefully shaking the snow from her dress.

  “What’s she come here for, that one?” asked Mother Corriveau. “He’s our dead.”

  When she saw the soldiers obey Molly, Mother Corriveau accepted her presence, and asked her, with an air of recognition on her face, “Tell them to take away the cover; our little boy is going to be too hot in there.”

  Molly translated. The soldiers gave Mother Corriveau a withering look. How dare she refer to the British flag as a “cover”! The old lady had no idea she had offended England; she would have been astounded if someone had told her that this “cover” was the flag her son had died for. If she had been told that, she would have kissed the flag as she kissed the relics of the tunic of the twenty-three-year-old Jesus Christ every night.

  The sergeant decided to ignore the insult. The soldiers folded the flag, the sergeant blew on his bugle a plaint that made the windowpanes shudder and the villagers, already assembled around Corriveau, weep. The sound of the bugle stunned Anthyme Corriveau, who nervously dropped his pipe. He cursed his rotten teeth that couldn’t hold a pipe any more. At twenty, Anthyme had had hard teeth that could crumble a glass, chew it. Now his rotten teeth were a sign that all his bones were going rotten too. He was so old, Anthyme, his sons were beginning to die. “When your sons begin to leave you, it won’t be long before you go to join them.”

  “Anthyme,” said his wife, “go find your screwdriver. I want to see if our boy’s face has been all mashed up or if he knew enough to protect it like I told him. In all my letters I used to tell him, ’My child, think first of all of your face. A one-legged man, or even a man with no legs at all, is less frightening for a woman than a man with only one eye or no nose.’ When he wrote back the dear child always said, ‘I’m taking good care to protect my face.’ Anthyme! I asked you for your screwdriver. I want that coffin opened.”

  Molly, in practising her trade, had learned several words of French. The French Canadians in Newfoundland liked Molly a lot. She explained, according to what she had understood, the Corriveaus’ wish. The sergeant said, “No! No! No! No!”

  His men shook their heads to say “No” too. Mother Corriveau took the sergeant’s hand and squeezed it with all her might: she would have liked to squash it like an egg. The sergeant, with a courteous strength, freed himself. His face was pale, but he smiled.

  The sergeant felt sorry for these ignorant French Canadians who did not even recognize their country’s flag.

  “Anthyme Corriveau, you’re going to take your shotgun and get these maudits Anglais out of my house. They take my son from me, they let him get killed for me, and now they won’t let me see him. Anthyme Corriveau, take out your shotgun and shoot them right between the buttocks, if they’ve got any.”

  Crushed by the heaviest despair, old man Corriveau relit his pipe. At this moment there was nothing more important than managing to light his pipe.

  “Anthyme!” shouted his wife. “If you don’t want to use your shotgun, give them a kick. And get busy! After that you’re going to look for your screwdriver.”

  “Vieille pipe de Christ! You can ask me for my screwdriver as often as you want. I can’t remember where I put it last time I…”

  “Anthyme! Get these maudits Anglais out of this house!”

  The old man put out his match; the flame was burning his fingers. He spoke after several puffs. “Mother, we can’t do a thing. Whether you see him or not, our boy is gone.”

  Mother Corriveau said simply, “We’re going to pray.”

  Her husband had reminded her of the most obvious fact: “We can’t do anything,” Anthyme had said. An entire life-time had taught them that they could do nothing. Mother Corriveau was no longer angry. It was with a gentle voice that she had said, “We’re going to pray.”

  She knelt, her husband did the same, then the villagers who had come, then Molly, taking care not to crease her wedding dress. The old woman started the prayer, the prayer she had learned from the lips of her mother, who had learned it from hers: “Our Lady of the faithful dead: may he rest in peace among the saints of the Lord.”

 
The seven soldiers knelt: the old lady was so astonished that she could not remember the rest of the formula.

  “Anthyme,” she muttered, “instead of getting all distracted while your son is burning in the fires of purgatory it might be a good thing if you’d pray for him. Your prayers will shorten his suffering. But then when I think of how you brought him up, I don’t know if he’s in purgatory or already in hell. Maybe he’s in hell. In hell...”

  She was choked by sobs. Anthyme started again, with the words of a man who has had to pray every time his wife threatens him with hell: “Que le Seigneur des fidèles défont les lunes en paix dans la lumière du paradis.”

  Everyone replied, “Amen.”

  “Je vous salue Marie, pleine et grasse, le Seigneur avez-vous et Bénedict et toutes les femmes et le fruit de vos entallies, Albanie.”

  “Amen.”

  The incantation was taken up several times. Then, Anthyme Corriveau was praying alone. No one was replying to his invocations any more. What was going on? He continued to pray, but he opened his eyes. Everyone was looking at his wife, who was lost in a happy dream. She was smiling.

  The Blessed Virgin had given her mother’s heart to understand that her son was in heaven. All of his sins, his oaths, his blasphemies, the caresses he had given the girls of the village, and especially the girls in the old country where had had gone to war, his drunken evenings when he used to go walking in the village throwing his clothes in the snow, the evenings when bare-chested and drunk her son would raise his fist to Heaven and shout, “God, the proof that you don’t exist is that you aren’t striking me down right now,” all these sins of Corriveau had been pardoned; the Blessed Virgin had breathed it to his mother.

  If the hand of God had not struck down Corriveau on those nights it had weighed on the roofs of the houses. People in the village would not forget those alcoholic evenings, even if God had forgiven Corriveau for them. His mother felt in her soul the peace that must now be her child’s. Her son had been pardoned because he had died in the war. The old lady felt in her heart that God was obliged to pardon soldiers who had died in the war.

  Her son had been reclothed in the immaculate gown of the elect. He was beautiful. He had changed a little since he had gone off to war. A mother gets used to seeing her children look more and more like strangers. Dying transforms a face too. Mother Corriveau saw her son among the angels. She would have liked him to lower his eyes towards her, but he was completely absorbed in the prayer that he was murmuring, smiling. The old lady wept, but she wept for joy. She rose.

  “Take my son out of the kitchen and put him in the living room. We’re going to eat. I’ve made twenty-one tourtières. Anthyme, go dig up five or six bottles of cider.”

  Furniture was shifted to free a wall against which the coffin was placed. In front of it rows of chairs were arranged, like in church. Anthyme had gone to the shed to look for some big cherry-wood stumps that would make solid legs for the coffin. Mother Corriveau had taken all her candles from the drawers, the tallow ones and those made of beeswax, the ones that had been blessed and the others. The blessed ones had protected her family during thunder and lightning; the others served very well for giving light when the electricity was cut off by storms or by ice on the wires. The soldiers stood at attention. Anthyme, with some other villagers, installed himself in front of them and fell asleep immediately, as he always did when he sat down. Mother Corriveau stuffed her stove with wood, because twenty-one tourtières would not be enough. “When there’s a dead person in the house the living have to eat for those who have passed away.”

  “Everyone” as Anthyme said — even the villagers who had not spoken to the Corriveaus for ten years — had arrived or were on their way, all dressed in black.

  “We’re going to say a little prayer so that his soul will requiescat in pace.”

  On her knees, hands joined on the coffin, Molly prayed. What prayer could she say, she who could speak only English? “She must pray to her God, the English God,” thought Anthyme. “The God of the English and the God of the French Canadians couldn’t be the same one; that isn’t possible. The English protestants are damned, so there couldn’t be a God for the damned in hell. She isn’t praying at all; she’s only pretending.”

  Mother Corriveau interrupted her work for a minute to look at Molly. “I didn’t think of asking her, but she could be the wife of our son… Maybe our little boy got married during a break when there wasn’t any war. Maybe he told us about his marriage in a letter that was bombed by the Germans. There’s no way of knowing. This war is turning life inside out. Anyway, if she is our son’s wife we’ll keep her with us just like our own daugher… I’ll talk to her about that later. It’s not a question you can easily ask a young girl who has just been married when there’s a dead man in the house and the dead man has married her just a couple of days before.”

  To keep awake Anthyme got up and was leaning against the doorframe. He was contemplating Molly’s lush body: her breasts - it would have taken both Anthyme’s hands to hold just one — where they swelled out her bodice, and her waist, which heralded buttocks that could make a man lose his head. Looking at Molly made him young, gave him a rest from Mother Corriveau all swallowed up in her own fat.

  Suddenly the door was opened, almost torn off its hinges, by a kick that shook the whole house. Everyone found themselves, prayers on their lips, in the kitchen. A soldier was standing on the doorstep, paralysed before all those people whom he recognized, pale and frightened. It was Bérubé.

  “I’ve come to get my wife,” he explained. “They said Molly was here with the maudits Anglais.” He spoke almost politely.

  “She’s in there,” indicated Mother Corriveau, relieved now that Molly was not the wife of her son. “Don’t put your dirty feet on the rug. And before you enter a house, you ask permission.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t say that, you cheeky little hoodlum. When you were little you used to say ’excuse me.’ It always meant you were going to come back and do something worse.”

  Molly understood, but she didn’t turn around. She stayed alone on her knees with Corriveau. Bérubé ran into the living room, grabbed Molly by the arm, shook her, and with his other hand he slapped her.

  “Whore!”

  Molly didn’t try to protect herself.

  “When you’re married you don’t turn on the charm, either to dead men or living ones.”

  Molly’s nose was bleeding. Her dress would be stained.

  “I’m going to make you understand you’re my wife and not a whore.”

  He struck her with both hands. Molly collapsed, wedged between the foot of the coffin and the wall. Bérubé brought back his big leather boot and prepared to kick.

  “Atten - shun! ! !” thundered the guttural voice of the sergeant.

  Bérubé stood at attention. He clicked his heels. Bérubé was nothing but a ball of obedient muscles. The sergeant who had barked out the order walked towards Bérubé and gave him a steely look. Bérubé waited to be hit. The sergeant, two steps away from him, breathed in his face. Bérubé felt as if his eyes were melting and trickling down his cheeks; in fact, he was crying. He was crying because there was nothing he could do. Bérubé felt like attacking the sergeant, dislocating his jaw, blackening his eyes, making him bleed.

  After a long, silent confrontation the sergeant said, “Dismiss.”

  Bérubé turned on his heel and Molly followed him, holding his arm. Mother Corriveau detained them just as they were going out. “As far as I’m concerned I don’t want you not to stay. I don’t want you to have to go out in the snow. Even dogs don’t go out at this hour. I offer you my boy’s room; he doesn’t need to sleep now.”

  In the bedroom Molly took off her dress.

  “Whore of a woman,” said Bérubé as he took down his pants. He was laughing. Undressed, he lay down against her; they embraced, the world spun around them. For a moment they were happy.

  Bérubé o
pened his eyes abruptly and said, “Corriveau isn’t going to like this, us having fun, making love in his bed.”

  Night darkened the snow. The candle flames were dancing on the flag-covered coffin. The living-room was filled with men and women from the village packed tightly against one another. The soldiers were lined up against the wall, motionless, erect, looking towards Corriveau, silent. Everyone was praying, mumbling “Mother of God,” “Save us sinners,” “At the hour of our death”: tirelessly they repeated the phrases, “Forgive us our mortal faults,” “Welcome them into the kingdom of the Father,” “Requiescat-in-pace”; they purred “God,” “Amen,” “Holy Ghost,” “Deliver him from the claws of the devil.” Pronouncing these prayers they began to miss Corriveau; they were sorry that they had not liked him when he was among them, before the war; they prayed loudly as though Corriveau could hear them and recognize their voices, as if their prayers could make Corriveau happy under his British flag. The villagers were alive, they were praying to remind themselves, to remember that they were not with Corriveau, that their life was not over; and all the time thinking they were praying for Corriveau’s salvation, it was their own joy in being alive that they proclaimed in their sad prayers. The happier they were the more they prayed, and the little flames on Corriveau’s coffin wavered, danced, as though they were trying to free themselves from their wicks. Shadow and light played on the wall, making strange designs that perhaps meant something. The air disturbed the flag a little. It seemed as if Corriveau was going to get up. They prayed, they murmured, they whispered; they finished their prayers, began again; they swallowed their words to pray more quickly, while in the kitchen Mother Corriveau beat at her pie dough with her fists, and the sweat ran down her back, onto her forehead, into her eyes; she wiped it with her floury hands. Her face was white with flour and the sweat ran into the flour. She stopped a drop that was tickling between her breasts, and started again to prepare her pastry, stirring, rolling, twisting, while on the stove the pork was crackling in its boiling fat.