by Eric Dupont
“If that Caron woman so much as looks at you, you come straight home. You don’t say a word to her. Do you hear?”
Mrs. Bérubé twisted her daughter’s arm. They passed in front of the boys’ school, turned left, and walked toward the convent. In the courtyard, the nuns were rushing around, trying to round up the girls, excited to be back at school, into neat lines. The bigger girls were either helping or terrorizing the little ones, depending on their nature.
The convent: A brick cube that was home to the Sisters of the Child Jesus, complete with kitchen, parlor, refectory, and laundry room, as well as a school for girls. You went in through a side door, the front entrance being reserved for visitors to the parlor. At the sight of the sea of women and girls, little Solange panicked, dug her heels into the gravel, and refused to take another step. She wouldn’t go. Why hadn’t she been enrolled at the Christian Brothers School with her brothers? To be taught by men so clean and handsome that everyone wanted to be like them? Why this? And those awful cashmere tights! The sea of girls was already drawing closer in threatening little waves; a nun welcomed Mrs. Bérubé, who was only too pleased to be relieved of her burden. Solange didn’t cry. On principle. She recalled, not without a twinge of regret, the Saturday afternoon outside in the yard when her brother Marcel had explained to her, proof in hand, why she was off to the convent and he to the Christian Brothers School. While he did up his fly, Solange had wondered when that thing had grown between his legs and, especially, how it had grown so fast? What prayer had been answered in return for it? What good deed had it rewarded? The thing—it looked so small, topped with a sort of bishop’s hat—seemed to endow its owner with such incredible powers and privileges: he could drive a car, wear a cowboy hat, snore on the living-room sofa, speak at the table, exist.
“If the Lamontagne girl speaks to you,” her mother was saying again, “tell the nun. We’ll take care of it!”
As though the trauma of having been abandoned in a place peopled exclusively with women was not discouraging enough, fate would have it that Madeleine and Solange would sit beside each other in Grade 1A, right in front of their teacher, Sister Saint Arsenius, who was now barking out the pupils’ names.
“When you hear your name, say ‘Yes, Sister,’ and come take your books. Don’t drop them. Don’t damage the corners. Take good care of them or you will be punished! Silence! Raymonde April!”
“Yes, Sister!”
Solange glanced around the room, trying not to look in Madeleine Lamontagne’s direction. Little footsteps could be heard. Raymonde April was shaking as she was handed her first textbooks. Posters covered in letters lined the walls. A map of the world. A crucifix. The nun had explained that these were photos of holy people: our Holy Father Pope Pius XII in his mitre. His hat looked like her brother Marcel’s penis, Solange thought to herself, except Pius XII was a penis that wore little round glasses. Yes, they were definitely the same shape. The masculine presence reassured her a little.
“Solange Bérubé!”
“Yes, Sister.”
Solange stepped forward and saw the image of Sister Saint Arsenius grow as she handed her a catechism and a reading book with a smile. A few of the girls giggled at Solange’s lumberjack-like stride. Solange looked daggers at a little blond girl and went back to her seat.
“Marie Castonguay!”
“Yes, Sister!”
Madeleine Lamontagne smiled. Solange couldn’t see her, but she could hear her smile. Just like she could hear her breathe and perspire. Her gaze fell on her neighbor to the left. The girl was still whimpering at being separated from her family.
“Simone Dumont!”
“Yes, Sister.”
The crybaby’s name was Simone. The show of tears exasperated Solange. But where else could she settle her gaze without risk of being dazzled by the light emanating from Madeleine Lamontagne? She stared hard at the photograph of the archbishop of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière for a moment, a man with a reassuring face.
“Madeleine Lamontagne!”
Absolute silence. Madeleine got up from her chair and walked toward the nun. The nun seemed to know her already and smiled at her perhaps a little more sincerely than she had the others. Madeleine sat back down. Thirty girls each paraded by Solange in this way. Then it was time for the skirt test.
In alphabetical order, the girls were told to come kneel one by one before the rest of the class. Once they were on their knees, the skirt of their sober uniforms was to fall in line with the floor, without touching it, and without creasing. Madeleine and Solange, both daughters of scrupulous mothers, passed the test hands down. Others were less fortunate and met with their first threats. “Rectify the situation, Miss, or there will be problems.”
Sister Saint Arsenius began the first reading lesson. It wasn’t until the afternoon that things took a turn for the worse for Solange. Until then, she had managed to completely ignore Madeleine Lamontagne. She hadn’t so much as looked at her. Not even when Sister Saint Arsenius had had her recite a prayer to the Virgin Mary. But then disaster struck poor Solange. While the nun barked out the first letters of the alphabet, banging a wooden ruler against the blackboard, Madeleine started to take an interest in Solange. She was discreet at first, then she said her name. Once in a whisper, once out loud.
“Solange!”
Solange ignored her neighbor at first. She must have recognized her from Rue Saint-François-Xavier. Perhaps she had just learned her name and wanted to try it out. Sister Saint Arsenius shot the two girls a fearsome look. But Madeleine wouldn’t let it go.
“Solange! Solange Bérubé!”
Why must she suffer so? Why, Lord, why? Solange looked up. Sister Saint Arsenius was now standing between her desk and Madeleine’s. It was then that Solange made her mistake: she looked Madeleine in the eyes. Into the depths of her teal-colored eyes. And in them she could clearly make out a promise.
Madeleine smiled. Two seconds later, the contents of the Bérubé girl’s stomach spewed out of her mouth in a powerful yellowish stream and splashed against Sister Saint Arsenius’s immaculate wimple.
“Oh dear! No prizes for guessing which disease-ridden family you come from, Solange Bérubé!”
And so, groggy from having thrown up and feeling more than a little unsteady on her feet, Solange was dragged by the arm to the infirmary and the nurse, Sister Mary of the Eucharist. While the first hours at the convent had terrorized her, and hearing her name come out of Madeleine Lamontagne’s mouth had caused her to projectile vomit, the sight of Sister Mary of the Eucharist overcame what remained of her composure and courage. A nose. A huge nose. A sort of hook of flesh and bone. That’s all she saw leaning over her before she lost consciousness.
“We’ll have to keep an eye on her. Your daughter is a fragile one,” Sister Mary of the Eucharist told Mrs. Bérubé when she came to pick up her daughter, who’d fainted on the first day of school.
Mind you there was nothing unusual about the little girls of Rivière-du-Loup fainting or vomiting at the sight of Sister Mary of the Eucharist. In fact, the nun in question was surprised to be brought a little girl who had already vomited. Barely a few hours after throwing up her breakfast over Sister Saint Arsenius’s wimple, Solange threw herself wholeheartedly into a novena to Our Lady, asking for a favor almost too shameful to mention, not at any rate to her mother or her brothers, let alone the nuns at the convent, who would probably be the last to understand Solange’s childish desire for God to give her a penis. If she had a penis, Solange would be sent straight to the Christian Brothers School with her brothers like a normal person. And she would no longer have to sit beside Madeleine, who unsettled her so. The following morning, Mrs. Bérubé decided to keep Solange home. The child wasn’t sent back to the convent for another two days, her heart heavy. Upon her return to Grade 1A, the photograph of Pius XII was waiting for her, thumbing his nose at her with his big, firm papal mitre that was probably soft, warm, and spongy on the inside.
Sol
ange’s lack of enthusiasm for the convent hadn’t escaped Mrs. Bérubé’s notice; she was growing worried at seeing her youngest daughter more demoralized by the day. It wouldn’t be long before the little girl outright hated the convent and everything it stood for. But shortly after joining Sister Saint Arsenius’s class, Solange made a fabulous discovery: schoolyard gossip, disparaged by some, enjoyed by others, practiced by all. And so, one October morning, never suspecting the exquisite pleasure awaiting her, Solange intercepted the muttered conversation of two up-and-coming Grade 6 gossip artists in the covered part of the playground.
“The undertaker’s been playing around. My sister told me.”
“And how would your sister know?”
“She didn’t say. But what I do know is that Mrs. Lagacé’s youngest son . . . You know, Mrs. Lagacé, the fat cow who lives over on Saint-André? Well, he has teal-colored eyes, just like Madeleine Lamontagne’s. Take a good look the next time you’re talking to him.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Word has it they met when The Horse went to pick up Grandpa Lagacé’s body. It was Mrs. Lagacé who called him and she was home alone. The neighbors heard it all! The body wasn’t even cold!”
“As long as he doesn’t do it with dead women.”
“Yuck! You’re disgusting.”
Pricking up her ears at the sound of gossip from every corner of the convent schoolyard, from every alcove, from beside every statue of every beatific saint—Saint Blandina and Saint Lawrence being her favorites—Solange learned more about the Lamontagne family than any other subject, on or off the curriculum. Whenever she noticed that one girl seemed to know a little more than another about Louis Lamontagne, she would arrange to bump into her as often as she could and try to win her trust. How many friendships did she force between Grade 1 and Grade 6 just to hear snatches from Louis Lamontagne and Irene Caron’s past and present? Had it not been for this playground gossip and the whisperings in the refectory, Solange Bérubé would probably have died of sadness and terror at the Sisters of the Child Jesus convent. But every recess, every trip down the building’s hallways, every moment spent standing in line in the schoolyard brought with it the possibility that she might learn a little more about the Lamontagnes. The child lived only for these snatches of conversation; they were the sole reason she paid the slightest bit of attention at school, all the way up to Grade 6. From one such conversation she learned how Louis Lamontagne met Irene Caron; from another, all there was to be known about the strained relations between Old Ma Madeleine and her daughter-in-law. As reliable as any intelligence service, the convent girls probably knew more about the Lamontagne family than Madeleine did herself. And tongues wagged and wagged . . . Sometimes indulgent, sometimes vicious, always informative, the gossip piled up over the years until it constituted—without Solange ever having to ask a single indiscreet question—the sum of all she knew about her neighbors, which is to say the story of Louis Lamontagne since his triumphant return to Rivière-du-Loup on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in June 1948. Scraps of gossip and intercepted love letters nevertheless have the peculiar drawback of not recounting stories in chronological order.
When Louis Lamontagne returned to the country in 1948, three years after the war’s end, he found the family home almost deserted. His uncle Napoleon had married and gone off to live in a remote village by a lake; a lake where, legend had it, there lived a monster. His aunts, all younger than he, had married farmers and men who worked for the railway. Old Man Lamontagne had died in 1946 while Louis was still waiting to be repatriated. All alone in the vast wooden house on Rue Fraserville, Old Ma Madeleine was busy hulling strawberries when her grandson Louis Lamontagne reappeared. She hadn’t felt so relieved since the time they told her she had died, thirteen years earlier. He had just come from Rivière-du-Loup’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade, he told her.
The first thing she asked him was: “Are you hungry, Louis?”
One chicken, eight potatoes, and four glasses of cider later, she began asking about the old country she would never see. The dead don’t travel, you see. Louis had little to say. Madeleine told him about her husband’s funeral, Napoleon’s wedding, and a few recent baptisms. Louis had brought a gift back from Europe, a strange little painting. Sitting at the wooden table where they had changed his diapers when he was a baby, he gave it to Old Ma Madeleine, who looked at it curiously. It was a religious scene the old woman had never seen before. Someone—a woman—was lying on a slab of granite. It was Mary. Yes, of course it was. Covered in a loose-fitting garment, some sort of blue sheet. Her eyes were closed, probably once and for all. The apostles were gathered around her. Old Ma Madeleine recognized Andrew, tall and strong, Peter, and the others. Bending down over his mother’s body, Jesus was holding a baby in swaddling clothes. A few seraphims were flying in the upper left-hand corner.
“Did you draw it? Is that your mother?”
Louis laughed for the first time since the liberation of Dachau. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the scene might mean. He had been given the picture over in Europe. All those men standing over a dead woman’s body had reminded him of Old Ma Madeleine’s wake; the bright halo around Christ’s head, of the statues in the church where he was born. Everything about the painting brought him back to Rivière-du-Loup and, without knowing exactly why, the scene of the Virgin’s entombment had inspired him, after five years of service in the US Army, to return to the calm of his Northern shores.
“If you’re not the one who painted it, then who did?”
Old Ma Madeleine held the painting in her bony hands. Louis hadn’t a clue. The picture was all he had brought back with him from Europe. And in the stories he continued to tell, he often spoke of the old countries, of the Germans and French. Only once did he speak of the liberation of Dachau, years later, sitting at the Ophir bar. Some idiot had shouted something at him, made some stupid remark or other about concentration camps. The idiot became a projectile, and then he shut up. For a very long time. When he came around, weeks later, he found himself another bar.
Old Ma Madeleine had followed her grandson, the only living human being who remained with her in this world, to the house on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, a bigger and more modern home than the one on Rue Fraserville. Louis had bought it with all his earnings from the United States, all the prizes brought home from county fairs, his pay from the US Army, and the money he made from selling the house on Rue Fraserville, bought by a perfectly uninteresting family. It was shortly after he came back from Germany that he opened his funeral home. From Dachau, he had brought back the fragrance of death. The smell stuck to his skin until he became one with it.
His interest in the dead had come about, by his own admission, on a particularly grey day in Bavaria. It had been snowing and he was advancing across a field with the other foot soldiers when he stumbled on a rock that let out a moan. The rock was surrounded by other rocks, though those ones were dead. The rock said its name was David Rosen. He had marched with other prisoners from Dachau for six days, escorted by the SS. The German guards eventually realized they would never reach Tyrol: the Americans had them surrounded. All around him, prisoners were dying of exhaustion. Those who tried to escape were shot dead. The following morning, the Germans ordered them all to lie down in a clearing, and then the miracle happened. Big, fat, Alpine snowflakes began to fall, lazy and dense. Rolled up in his blanket, Rosen had fallen asleep on the ground, hoping to die at last. Realizing the Americans were no more than a few hundred yards away, the Germans fled, though not before firing a few rounds into the bodies lying in the clearing. But so much snow had fallen that they hadn’t seen Rosen’s body buried beneath it. When he awoke, he pulled back the blanket and saw only a huge white mass that he took to be death, and was happy to find himself there. But the white mass gave way beneath his fingers. Before him stood a giant of a man with teal-colored eyes. His teeth were the same color as the snow that had saved him from the German bullets. Louis was tasked with
piling the frozen bodies into a truck. They all wore striped pajamas, all had their eyes open, their hands sometimes frozen mid-movement. Some had died on their bellies, with one hand raised as though to bid a final frozen farewell to the world. The bodies were hard to stack in the cold, like trying to pack tiny lead soldiers into a cigar box. Then the truck left, leaving behind the American soldiers and David Rosen, the only survivor of that death march.
“If it hadn’t snowed that morning, the Germans would have seen me and shot me. The snow saved me,” David told Louis.
That was all he said, over and over.
There were shortages of just about everything in Germany in 1945, but not of bodies. There were mountains of them; all of them disappeared without burial into the depths of the German soil.
It was this injustice that Louis was determined to right upon his return to Canada. “We should never be ashamed of our dead” had been his first slogan. And that’s why Louis had made a long stopover in Quebec City before coming home. It took him six months to learn—at the hands of Henri Bellerose, an experienced undertaker if ever there was one—how to minister to mortal remains and run a funeral home. It really wasn’t so different from a strongman contest: make everything appear entirely natural in spite of the circumstances, never pass up on an opportunity to introduce an element of theater, and speak parsimoniously. At the master undertaker’s in Quebec City, Louis learned that a single misplaced word can spread like a disease through a family and end up depriving you of customers. You even have to be careful how you look at them, Bellerose had often told him: even the most stoical can become highly emotional at a time of mourning. Before letting his apprentice go, Bellerose had one last piece of advice for him:
“You’re a fine-looking man, Louis. That’s important for an undertaker. Stay elegant. The dead will thank you for it. Don’t just count on your natural good looks. And remember: you can’t go wrong with black.”
The Bérubés, neighbors to the Lamontagne funeral home, were not in the least enthused by the new business on Rue Saint-François-Xavier. Dead people? How ghastly! They shook their heads every time they saw a casket in the street or Papa Louis smiling at the disgusted family from behind the wheel of the hearse. And that Irene . . .