by Eric Dupont
“And now, ladies, girls—he peered over at the two young sisters, their white stockings sticking out like a sore thumb in the sea of men—and gentlemen, now that our contenders have warmed up, we can get down to business. Bring in the heavy loads for the real men!”
The tall blond man who had given up his seat explained to the newcomers that they had missed the first event, a jaw-dropping bent press that a Canadian had won handily. A man known to all as The Warsaw Giant and a certain Idaho Bill had finished second and third.
A pair of scrawny men set up two wooden sawhorses three yards apart and laid a thick oak door on top. It left just enough room for a man to squat down between the door and the ground. The master of ceremonies called down from the stands the stoutest men he could find. Soon, seven strapping men were sitting on the wooden door. A murmur rippled through the audience. Beth’s neighbor guessed out loud that the seven giants must weigh at least fourteen hundred pounds, all told. In the voice of a tormented tenor, the master of ceremonies tried to calm the din rising from the stands.
“The next event consists of squat-lifting the wooden door, including passengers, for ten seconds. Competitors shall be allowed to touch the door with their hands and rest it against their upper back. We ask our distinguished volunteers to please hold still and show nothing but the utmost calm throughout this extremely dangerous maneuver. We do not wish to see a repeat here in Gouverneur of the unfortunate incident that left one poor fellow in Buffalo with a broken tooth! And I am counting on my distinguished audience to help me with the countdown! Now, without further ado, please welcome Michigan’s very own Samson: The Great Brouyette!”
A short, stocky man strode into the tent through an opening in the side. The striped costume that left his shoulders bare threatened to come apart at the seams. Floria and Beth burst out laughing at the sight of the little moustachioed man intent on lifting over a ton. Brouyette crouched beneath the door, and the tent fell silent. Then, after a few deep breaths, the unthinkable happened: the door and its seven passengers were lifted a few inches up into the air. Floria let out an admiring whistle.
“My word. Did you see that, Beth?”
Beth had indeed seen it, too, and there was more to come. Three strongmen followed, one after the other. Each managed to lift the seven men, their faces lighting up with incredulity every time they felt the wood they were sitting on shift beneath them. After The Great Brouyette came Idaho Bill, The Warsaw Giant, and Alexander Podgórski, a Pole whose name meant “of the mountain.” Podgórski, a strapping curly-haired fellow who wore a black costume and must have been six foot four, was cross-eyed, which brought a smile to the faces of the Ironstone sisters. Remarkably, his squint disappeared the very moment he lifted the door, as though the effort had realigned his eyes.
“Look, Beth. He looks a little like Adolf, Old Whitman’s calf!”
Beth pinched herself so hard she drew blood as she tried to stifle a laugh.
A triumphant Podgórski thanked the cheering crowd. After The Warsaw Giant, it was he who had lifted the weight the longest and the fastest, so easily in fact that he had not even been heard to moan or groan like the men before him, especially Idaho Bill, who had let out a pained whinny as he struggled to hoist the load. The crowd had counted down—“ten, nine, eight, seven, six . . .”—while Idaho Bill collapsed under the weight of the men. A stricter master of ceremonies would have disqualified him for giving way too quickly.
To announce the fifth and final contender, the emcee took on a deeper tone.
“And finally, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, for the first time in the state of New York, the iron man of Canada, Louis ‘The Horse’ Lamontagne!”
As he said the word “ladies,” the master of ceremonies had again looked straight at Floria, as though to stress that the man he had just announced was a sight for sore female eyes. Floria felt the crowd turn to look at her as one. To keep her composure, she adjusted the little cloth flower above her right ear while she pursed her lips and did her best to look dignified.
And so appeared Louis Lamontagne. For the crowd at the St. Lawrence County Fair, Louis would go down in history as “The Horse.” That’s how the master of ceremonies had introduced him, and that’s how he would remain in the minds of the Americans. The applause lasted longer than for the other contestants who, behind the canvas, must have been wondering what the audience saw in the Canadian, a greenhorn not yet turned twenty-one whom it was virtually impossible to hold a conversation with because, as his name suggested, he was French Canadian. While Louis Lamontagne’s rivals refused to ponder aloud what made the Canadian so special in the crowd’s eyes, it was certainly no mystery to the Ironstone sisters. Least of all to Floria who, until the day of her sudden death while watching the NBC newsreader announcing John F. Kennedy’s election on November 9, 1960, used to describe Louis Lamontagne as the handsomest man in America. It was that simple. Between that Saturday in August of 1939 and John F. Kennedy’s election as US President, Floria Ironstone must have proclaimed at least thirty times to a great many people, including her own daughter, Penelope Ironstone, that Louis Lamontagne had swept her off her feet. If she happened to be there, too, her sister Beth would nod as if to confirm what her sister said was true, and that she had seen it with her own eyes.
The emcee stepped back to reveal the beast. Louis Lamontagne must have been over six foot six, his hair dark and wavy, the hair of the Roman emperors in American black and white movies. Unlike his rivals, all of whom seemed to have been molded from a barrel, Louis Lamontagne was nothing but muscle and bone. But what bone! When he flexed his right arm, a bicep as big as a cantaloupe sprang up, and an appreciative murmur rippled through the tent. Clad in a skin-tight navy-blue leotard, Louis Lamontagne did not appear to believe in the virtues of humility and prudishness cherished by a certain segment of society. But no one in the audience seemed the least concerned about that. His body was offered up for their admiration just like that of Adolf the calf, who was at that very same moment, only a few hundred yards away, being observed, assessed, judged, and graded in every respect. Acutely aware of the effect he was having on his audience, Louis Lamontagne advanced, feet slightly apart to display his shapely thighs and improbably round calf muscles. “Legs like a horse,” muttered the old men in the third row. And what can be said of the hands of this colossus, other than that they would have surely made him, in another time, in another place, an Olympic swimming champion? Chiseled from marble, the body of Louis Lamontagne was almost entirely hairless, with the exception of one or two little tufts on his broad chest. The boy grinned the grin of one too good-looking to hold a grudge. And like the peacock that had strutted for the Ironstone sisters that morning, Louis Lamontagne spread his arms wide before the hypnotized audience. Their admiration for this body was stealing the show, and the poor devils sitting on the wooden door were quickly forgotten as they waited patiently to be hoisted by the Canadian. Louis Lamontagne appeared more concerned with the admiring looks taking in his body from head to toe than by the feat of strength he would have to win if he wished to remain in the competition.
It would be unfair to the memory of the Ironstone sisters not to mention Louis Lamontagne’s face. Because while it might have been his perfectly defined muscles that won over the men at the fair, it was his grin that forever transformed him into an object of desire in the minds of the few ladies present. To picture him in your own mind’s eye, it is sufficient to imagine a slightly gentler side to Clark Gable, whose fine and elegant whiskers Louis Lamontagne also shared. And the eyes. Teal. Achingly beautiful. Eyes of a color so rare that one day a woman would cry, “If you walk out that door, don’t bother coming back!” and another, “I exist only for you . . .” and another still, just before she took her own life, would write as her last words, “I loved you, Louis. With all my heart.”
Floria ovulated.
Not knowing the term, she could never have put it quite like that, but that’s what happened. She felt it down
below, a sensation that brought a smile to her lips, perhaps at the precise moment when Louis Lamontagne’s gaze met hers. Fate’s fatal error. It was the beginning of the end for Floria Ironstone, as a wink smacked her full in the face. To an audience well used to seeing strongmen from all over the world on parade, Louis’s appearance was as pleasing as it was astonishing: as handsome as Charles Atlas—from whom the French Canadian must have learned the basics of Dynamic Tension by mail order—and built like Eugen Sandow, the Königsberg-born father of body building, Louis had a face with all the innocence of the angels who escorted the Virgin Mary. Without the slightest hesitation, anyone would have confided their wildest dreams in Louis in the hopes that he might find a way to make them come true, because to have developed a body such as his in the 1930s was really something. Who but a countryman’s son would ever have gotten his hands on enough animal protein to go about putting so much meat on his bones?
“He’s the new Louis Cyr!”
Hogwash. Louis Cyr might have been the world’s strongest man, but never its most handsome. Louis Cyr had never caused the young ladies of the state of New York to spontaneously ovulate. Louis Cyr did not have Louis Lamontagne’s angelic smile. Cyr had been a brute force straight out of the Old Testament; the Canadian colossus now crouching down under the wooden door looked more like an attempt by God to seek forgiveness for the flood and the regrettable excesses of Deuteronomy.
“But he’s too tall to be Louis Cyr’s boy!”
Indeed he was. Unless, of course, Cyr had married a giant, which hadn’t been the case at all. Louis Cyr’s wife was tiny, as anyone who followed strongmen knew. “So where did he come from?” the regulars wondered. The need to find an answer to the question lost all significance as soon as Louis shouldered the door and its seven passengers into the air. He looked up mischievously, smiled at Floria Ironstone, gave her another wink, then gently set down the load after more than twenty seconds had elapsed, without any of the passengers so much as feeling the door settle back down on the sawhorses. The audience went wild, jumping to their feet as they shouted and applauded, boisterously signaling that the rarest of events had just taken place. The Ironstone sisters rose along with the crowd and found themselves clapping until their wrists threatened to give way, shouting loud enough to be heard all the way to Buffalo: “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!”
The remaining feats of strength were to be held outside that very same afternoon. The Ironstone sisters’ hearts were well and truly aflutter. They had followed the enthusiastic crowd outside, behind the squadron of strongmen and the master of ceremonies. Come! Come, one and all! Who will be the quickest to pull a car one hundred yards? Which of these five giants will manage to hoist a horse to the top of a telephone pole? There were four events in all: the bent press, the squat lift—both of which had just been won by Louis Lamontagne inside the tent—then the car pull and the horse hoist. First place would earn the winner three points; second place, two points; and third place, one point. The man who completed all four events with the most points would be taking home two hundred American dollars. After the first two events, Louis was top of the leaderboard. The Warsaw Giant, who had twice finished second, was hot on his heels, with Idaho Bill and cross-eyed Alexander Podgórski sharing third place.
The crowd leaving the tent did not go unnoticed by the fairgoers. Men, for the most part, peered over at the curious procession led by the master of ceremonies, who was closely followed by a bunch of strongmen in leotards bearing more than a passing resemblance to the cattle vying for the winner’s ribbons at the county fair. Just behind the megaphone-wielding master of ceremonies was handsome Louis, as happy as could be, bearing Idaho Bill’s right buttock on his left shoulder, the left buttock resting on the right shoulder of Alexander Podgórski, who was squinting for all he was worth. Bringing up the rear were The Great Brouyette—the Samson of Michigan—and The Warsaw Giant, who flexed their biceps to the amused looks of the fairgoers. A stream of tinny words spewed forth from the master of ceremony’s megaphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, people of the state of New York! After stupefying Iowa and Ohio, these strongmen are now going to dumbfound this great state of yours! Who among them will prove the strongest? Who among them will be crowned New York’s strongest man? Come watch the last two events at the county fair’s annual strongman contest and see who will be crowned champion. Will Idaho Bill manage to defend the title he fought so hard for last year? Will he be dethroned by his long-standing rival, The Great Brouyette? Or perhaps by the dashing young French Canadian, Louis ‘The Horse’ Lamontagne? We’ll all know in just under two hours’ time! And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s head out to the field for the car-pulling event! Come one and all. Come admire these forces of nature at work!”
Every last spectator that had witnessed the first two events followed behind, which is to say two or three hundred people who were still picking their jaws up off the floor. Their eyes still round with admiration and wonder, they aroused the interest of other fairgoers. They, too, began to follow the procession, first the young men, then their fathers, and then, finally, the women that Idaho Bill and Louis Lamontagne had been winking madly away at. Soon, there were at least two thousand people standing under the August sun around the perimeter of the field, which had been set up for the car pull. On the freshly mowed grass stood five brightly shining cars, loaned out for the duration of the fair by a handful of local bigwigs. The contenders’ task was quite simple: each man would be hooked up to a cable and harness, which were attached to a bumper. Upon the signal, the men would have to run the hundred yards like a devil knee-deep in molasses, dragging the car along behind them through pure brute force. The event was usually against the clock, but to the crowd’s great delight, for the St. Lawrence County Fair a car had been found for each of the contestants: five black 1938 Oldsmobile Coupés, borrowed from Buffalo, Gouverneur, and Potsdam. Bringing the spectacle outside, where the strongmen could be seen by everyone, had been a masterstroke. Nobody could possibly have missed the strange and noisy procession, led by a man in tails hollering into a megaphone, followed by creatures who were half-man, half-beast, and by a crowd that was visibly in their thrall. There was but one thing to do when confronted by this carnivalesque scene: join the glorious parade. The irresistible spectacle drained the crowd away from the other attractions, notably the giant pumpkin contest and the brass band. The band was performing a military march, and its conductor—a man with a moustache and an impeccable uniform—motioned to his musicians to fall in line behind the procession of strongmen. In no time at all, every visitor at the St. Lawrence County Fair, with the exception of those attending the ribbon ceremony by the horse and cattle enclosures, was now standing around the five black Oldsmobiles, each of the cars hooked up to a strongman. In each car sat five men, each man having weighed in at 180 pounds right before the public’s eyes, just to ramp up the suspense while the contenders were hooked up to their vehicles and harnesses. The Ironstone sisters, who had ringside seats to this extraordinary race across the field, held up their hands to shield their faces from the sun’s unrelenting rays. Their hearts were no longer their own, not since the Canadian had sent a wink in their direction during the squat lift. It was hard to say which of the sisters, Floria or Beth, had the highest hopes for this beast of the North. Silence fell. The cars’ passengers put on a show of their own: “Come on! Pull, Horse! Show us what you’re made of!” The master of ceremonies drew a pistol from his belt, which calmed the crowd. “On the count of three!” And the shot rang out in the scorching-hot sky above Gouverneur. The five contenders took off like rockets. At the end of his rope, whose length he had clearly overestimated, The Great Brouyette lurched backward, felled by the weight of his load. The crowd roared. He picked himself back up, but it was too late: Alexander Podgórski already enjoyed a comfortable lead ahead of Brouyette in fourth place . . . and he was no longer squinting, a miracle that came about every time he had to give his all. Unfortunately for him, his s
quint returned with a vengeance as soon as he relaxed his muscles.
Louis Lamontagne also got off to a difficult start, but for reasons unrelated to the weight of his load or the length of the cable that bound him to it. He had been distracted by the high-pitched shouts of Floria and Beth Ironstone as they chanted his name in an American accent that was not without its charms. The two sisters’ voices rang out in harmony, reminding Louis of a liturgical chant from his childhood, angelic tones that brought him back to the church of Saint-François-Xavier in Rivière-du-Loup. An elusive image of a communion procession flashed before his eyes like a movie, and for a second too long he lost contact with reality and slipped into third place behind The Warsaw Giant and Idaho Bill.
Wheezing like a galloping horse, almost sucking in his leotard in the process, handsome Louis Lamontagne advanced, his determination kindled by shouts of encouragement from the passengers in the Oldsmobile he was pulling. Part of the crowd had noticed the flirting between Louis and the Ironstone sisters, who were by now making no effort to conceal their love for the handsome Canadian.
Swept along by the innocent charm of the two young women—now in raptures over the colossus—in a voice at first muffled and hesitant, coming from the area where the sisters stood breathlessly, then spreading like a rumor that was soon on everyone’s lips until it reached the shores of the human sea surrounding the field in ever more powerful waves, the crowd chanted the winsome young man’s name along with the two sisters. Halfway through the race, the rest of the crowd began to chant “La-mon-tagne” as one, as though calling for a sacrifice.