River City

by John Farrow

  They hugged and kissed the little ones, and assured the girls that their mother dwelled happily in heaven, that she gazed down upon her lovely children.

  “Will we be in heaven soon?” one child asked. She was about eight. Her symptoms had only recently commenced.

  “Yes, my child, you will be with your mother soon.”

  Hand in hand, the four returned to the sheds.

  Later, the two old friends talked during their supper hour. “Some time ago now, Father, yet less than twenty years, starving English arrived in Montreal by ship. The bishop felt beset by pressures. He didn’t know what to do. The French wanted the English moved along. So did he, I might presume. Yet the bishop also suffered from an affliction of conscience, for under the robes of his office he remained a man of faith. The first migrants, he did pass along to Ontario. Many died on the journey, and those who survived were not well received. Others, he transported to your New York State. Alas, the Americans were generous, but they had no intention of receiving them all, for the arrivals were a feeble community in need of great personal care. The bishop did not want to keep them here, for as you know, the Church is responsible for distributing all lands, and it’s understood that land is to be distributed only to the French, not to the English. Still, the English were dying and more ships were sailing to our port.”

  “A tragedy. What did your bishop do?” Father O’Malley inquired. Acquainted with the Church in Canada, he knew it to be unlike any other. In France, the hierarchy of the Church was interested in the high affairs of state, as well as in ecclesiastical issues. In Germany, the Church was a body politic, actively working behind the scenes as an institution of influence. In other European nations, the Church was accustomed to living amid or adjacent to a Protestant authority, whereas in Quebec, the Church had become the dominant power—entrusted, really, with all matters of vital concern to the populace. The power of a bishop was never slight, nor were the consequences of a decision without reverberation and import.

  “At first, nothing, although he might prefer to dignify the period as his time of reflection. Then he did something quite extraordinary, Father. He made a deal with an English company—a pact with the devil, some would say, but I am not one of those—an agreement with the Sun Life Assurance Company.”

  The priest, who taught both American history and New Testament studies, while leading discussion groups among candidates for the priesthood on such esoteric concerns as the nature of the soul and the meaning of free will, original sin and the manifest attributes of the Trinity, inquired in the dim candlelight, “What sort of deal could that have been, Mother?”

  “If the company were to undertake the dispersal of certain lands—such as the lands across from the Mohawks at Oka, where no parish had been established—if these lands were to be reserved for starving English settlers, he would bequeath the company the right, and the land, to do so.”

  The priest nodded, and lightly drew a hand through his beard. “I see. So it is not the Church giving land to the English, but the Sun Life Assurance Company, and only land that does not impinge on the authority of an existing parish. Then it becomes the Sun Life Assurance Company that confers land to the English.”

  Mother McMullen nodded. “If you are French,” she opined, “and you desire land, you must attend to your good relations with the Church. It is the path to God, to a godly life. That will mean, as a rule, that one of your children, preferably the first born, will enter the priesthood, if a boy, or a convent if she’s a girl. If your family is large, the Church may anticipate that at least two of your offspring will choose the vocation of the Lord. Often it is more than that, as we know.”

  Father O’Malley cleared his throat. “Something in what you are saying sounds—how shall I put this, Mother McMullen?—I won’t say heretical, but—” “The proximity of death, Father, causes one to be fearless.” “I understand,” he said gravely.

  “But my point is not subversive. The English are here and we have given them land. Now the Irish are arriving, and we are giving them a chance to live, or at least to die, with some measure of human sympathy. If circumstances were different, Father, we’d probably be killing one another, firing cannon, engaging in swordplay. Men do that sort of thing, you know.”

  He agreed. “Men have been known to do that sort of thing.”

  “And many citizens, if they had the chance today, would drown us all in the river. Nevertheless, if we are willing to die for one another, Father, as so many have shown at the Irish sheds, why are we so less willing to live with one another?”

  “Ah. A true question on the mystery of life, Mother McMullen.”

  “Sadly, Father.” “Sadly?”

  “Is it not a question with no known reply? Is that not sad, Father?”

  He nodded. He wished his students could be sitting alongside him, listening and absorbing this. Later, they would have so much to discuss. Yet he knew that he would never see his beloved students again.

  The next morning, Father O’Malley reported his first symptoms.

  Surviving children numbered in the hundreds, cared for by the strapped Grey Nuns, and a renewed appeal to the surrounding parishes brought country-folk into town. Each of these rural families took one, or two, or, if they were bereft of children of their own, many more, and the Irish offspring, allowed to maintain their surnames to honour their dead parents, slipped away into the countryside to live with their new families and become French themselves.

  Finally, the ships from Ireland ceased arriving. The dying died. Those who were to recover did so, and knew that they’d been saved.

  Almost no one spoke of the horror again. Few could utter its name.

  A dozen years later, new Irish immigrants arrived to build a bridge to traverse the St. Lawrence River from the island of Montreal to the mainland, and in their travails the men dug into what appeared to be long trenches of bones. Upon their inquiries, they were informed that the bones belonged to their countrymen, who had died the most terrible of deaths.

  Bridge-builders dug a great black boulder, somewhat pear-shaped, out of the muck of the St. Lawrence River, and placed it in the path of the road to the bridge. The workmen commemorated their predecessors and marked their bones with the boulder, which would become known as the Irish Stone. On it, they inscribed:

  TO

  PRESERVE FROM DESECRATION

  THE REMAINS OF 6000 IMMIGRANTS

  WHO DIED OF SHIP FEVER

  A.D. 1847–48

  THIS STONE

  IS ERECTED BY THE WORKMEN OF

  MESSRS. PETO, BRASSEY AND BETTS

  EMPLOYED IN THE CONSTRUCTION

  OF THE

  VICTORIA BRIDGE

  A.D.1859

  Six thousand dead.

  Depleted, the Grey Nuns returned to their vocation, and soon enough recruited a full complement of devout women again.

  When she heard what the workmen had done, an aging, frail Mother McMullen asked to be taken down to view the Irish Stone for herself. There she knelt in prayer, and in time, despite her resources of will and devotion to God, in apparent indifference to her firm faith in the afterlife, she wept, remembering what she had tried so stubbornly to forget. There, she welcomed to mind the return of the faces of those who had perished in such anguish and incomprehension, and recalled the lives of so many good friends who had died in their faithful service.

  The souls of the dead had passed on, yet she felt the spirit of the bones stretching forth to address her. Upon that hallowed ground, Mother McMullen experienced what she would later describe to a friend as “an inestimable grace.” Through her tears, although she could not understand it, she felt a joy abide within her that she would call, in her search for a satisfactory language, “a resilient elation. Almost as though,” she told the friend, a sister in her convent too young to know of those days, “not that we deserved it, for we were there in God’s service, but almost as though we were all, each one of us, being summoned by name and being thanked. I
find the measure of that affection and of that grace, Sister, the depth of that bond between the living and the dead, fully all that I can bear, and speak of it now only to gain a corresponding measure of human relief.”

  CHAPTER 17

  1968

  CAPTAIN ARMAND TOUTON STUDIED THE YOUNG MAN, FROM HIS well-clipped hair down to his shiny black shoes. He cleaned up well. “This could work,” he said.

  Émile Cinq-Mars was standing for inspection in his brand new suit, having opted for grey, thinking blue too closely allied to the police. He still didn’t know what duty the captain of the Night Patrol had in mind for him, but his fellow officers were envious that he’d arrived in civvies. A few had whistled.

  “You look like a man with an education, someone who’s prepared to do business,” Touton told him. Cinq-Mars had strong features, dominated by a protuberant beak that usually garnered a second glance, or a prolonged gaze, from anyone initially meeting him. His eyes were strong also, and might pose a problem, for somehow they bespoke a gentleman of character, of quiet demeanour. “You look like you’ve made a buck without working up a sweat.”

  “Thank you, sir. I guess.”

  “You also look like a man with secrets. Do you have secrets, Cinq-Mars?” “Sir?”

  “Don’t fret. That’s a good thing. You aren’t expected to be Mr. Good Farmboy. I need you to look like a man accustomed to making sleazy deals. Can you do that—act like a young man who’s an ambitious swine?”

  Now he was certain that he was being teased, and he sidled up to the occasion. “Anyone who knows me understands that I’m ambitious, and according to the rioters the other night, I’m nothing if not swine.”

  Touton smiled. “Then you were right in what you said.”

  He’d forgotten. “What’s that, sir?” “You’re my man.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Again he wasn’t sure if he was being complimented or insulted.

  “Let’s meet the crew.”

  “What’s with the suit?” Anik wanted to know.

  “Can’t I dress up once in a while?” He was proud of his suit, his first decent one, so he wore it on their second date. He was calling it a date, although meeting for a late breakfast, or early lunch, didn’t seem wholly romantic. Given the late-night shifts he’d been pulling it seemed the best he could propose. The suit, he realized now, had been the wrong choice.

  “Look at yourself. Now look at me. What’s wrong with this picture?”

  He thought they made a handsome couple, but the question was not difficult to interpret. Anik wore her usual style of duds—patched jeans, a kneecap jutting through a rip, a form-fitting yellow-green top that exposed her navel. Beside her, one elbow on the countertop as they awaited their food, sat her date in a conservative grey suit.

  “We clash. We shout out ‘cultural divide,’” she answered, when he failed to.

  “Sorry.”

  Their first date had gone remarkably well, surprising them both. They had talked about their childhoods, and Cinq-Mars had gotten onto a tangent about his love of horses, which Anik shared, if only from a distance. That he was a cop and she a rebellious youth got lost in the intimacy of their time together, and they had talked and drunk lightly into the wee hours of the morning. For this second rendezvous, for brunch, Cinq-Mars had had little time to change—it would have taken a quick hustle home to his apartment and a rapid return downtown to meet her on time. He was already regretting that he hadn’t incurred the expense of a cab to do so. Secretly, he wanted her to see him in the suit, but now saw himself as the worst stereotypical hayseed the countryside had yet produced.

  “This is breakfast for me—an early rising. I can barely keep my eyes open, and look at you. Look. You’re dressed like you want to make a deal with the devil, then hail a limo to take you to the airport.”

  He smiled. He’d already guessed that her flume of insults probably substituted for endearments.

  “What’re you grinning at?”

  If he tried, he could get under her skin. He suspected he could do it to her more effectively than she did it to him. “If you feel underdressed, I could wait here while you go shopping.”

  She sat with her jaw slack a moment. “Me? Underdressed? You, Mister. You have the problem. You look like—”

  “I know what I look like. Handsome. Dashing, even. Debonair.”

  “Who do you think you are? Cary Grant?”

  “So you admit that you have a thing for Cary Grant.”

  “Hell I do.”

  “You’re not so into radicals with shaggy hair. You appreciate well-dressed, well-groomed men.” “Put a cork in it.”

  He had not done this before, and the moment did not seem particularly opportune, yet he followed through on the impulse as it popped to mind. Cinq-Mars leaned over and kissed her—emphatically, if briefly—on the lips.

  As he retreated, her jaw fell slack again, while her pretty brown eyes opened up saucer-wide.

  Their plates arrived, almost tossed down before them in the style of the place. Despite the abrupt service, the fare had a reputation for being exceptional. Cinq-Mars had ordered a mushroom and green pepper omelette, Anik a robust fruit plate with cottage cheese.

  “You cocky, belligerent, establishment oink-oink, you suit-and-tie-me-down retrograde, you ignorant lackey of the scurrilous upper classes—”

  “Keep it up, Anik, and I’ll kiss you again.”

  She went silent a moment, looking at him, then at her food, then looked at him through the mirror beyond the counter where food was prepared. She said, “You’re a worm, a reprobate, a political neophyte, an intellectual aardvark—”

  So he kissed her again.

  This time, the kiss lasted a while, and she was kissing him back, matching his fervour. They didn’t even stop when the waitress came by with their juice, and cleared her throat, and put the glasses down, and went away. They didn’t stop even when the occupants of a booth close by applauded.

  When they did stop, Anik said, “Jacket off. Tie off. Collar unbuttoned.”

  “Or what? We don’t kiss again?”

  “Or—we don’t eat.”

  He removed his jacket and tie, and, smiling, they both ate.

  Cinq-Mars remained in the dark about the duty he might be asked to perform. Every night he arrived at headquarters, wearing his suit, to the ever-increasing music of his colleagues’ jibes. They’d whistle and straighten his collar for him. He’d stand around anxiously, all dressed up, waiting to learn whether or not he was to change into his humble blues that night or remain proud in his civvies. On two occasions he was sent out to walk his beat, only to be ordered back downtown when he called to check in. He had to take a bus to get back. In the locker room, he peeled off his blue uniform, put on his new suit, then eagerly ascended in the elevator and waited for a further command that never came. His shift ended and he remained seated, waiting, until someone finally came by and told him to go home.

  “The situation is fluid,” Captain Armand Touton advised him.

  “I understand, sir,” he said, although he didn’t.

  “Can’t predict when we might need you. The best we can do is signal when you should be ready.”

  “I understand, sir, but what work am I supposed to be doing exactly?”

  “Around here, we don’t divulge our operations prematurely.”

  As Émile explained to Anik, he was being impatiently patient.

  On his lucky days, he arrived at headquarters and was advised to report to Touton for duty. He’d check the crease in his trousers and slick his hair back using Brylcreem to look marginally thuggish. Then he’d wait around and twiddle his thumbs for hours, and twice Touton took him for a ride through the streets of Montreal.

  “I love this town,” the captain told him one time as they wended their way through the tough eastern section of the city, beneath the tall spans of the Jacques Cartier Bridge. “Especially at night. This is my town at night. I’m not saying I’m the proprietor, I don’t own i
t, but I know this town. And I protect it.”

  “Who are we going after?”

  “Racketeers. The gambling end.”

  “Great.”

  “I want you inside as a gambling man. Detective Gaston Fleury—”

  “—the cop from Policy?”

  “Don’t laugh,” Touton admonished him. “He’s a real cop. He can be useful and effective in his own way.”

  “Yes, sir.” He acquiesced to Touton’s point of view, but continued to think, The man’s an accountant.

  “Detective Fleury will supply you with money. We have an identity for you, a name for you to give at the door, which should get you inside. Have you ever gambled, Cinq-Mars?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Not at all? A little bit? Surely you’ve placed a bet.”

  “No, sir.”

  The captain looked across at him, ignoring the road momentarily. “What are you—not only a farm boy but an altar boy to boot?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been an altar boy.”

  Touton chuckled. “Yeah, this is Quebec. We’ve all been altar boys. But even they play cards.” “Not me, sir.” “You have no vices?” “I drink Scotch. Beer, too, a little.”

  “We’ll teach you how to play roulette. It’s not exactly a skill game. You put your money down on a number or a colour, or both. You’re a smart cookie. You’ll figure it out. Nobody’s asking you to win. We just want you inside the gambling den. Make it look like you belong there before we come through the roof.”

  “Ah, the roof, sir?”

  The captain nodded. “My favourite. Skylights. Yeah, I’ve never met a skylight I didn’t enjoy busting through. It’s hard to believe so many of these gambling dens have skylights, but I see their problem. They want a place with no windows. They need natural light if the electricity goes out, and they want an extra way out in case cops surround the place. Too bad for them, I never go through the front door if they give me the option of a skylight.”