by Eric Dupont
“Madeleine Lamontagne!”
Madeleine looked up, her concentration interrupted.
“Yes?”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“You Lamontagnes are well used to death. The end of the world can’t have you too worried!”
Madeleine didn’t understand what the nun meant. Was she talking about her great-grandmother, her dad’s customers, or both? A ruler appeared in the nun’s hand.
“Are you going to answer me? You don’t have much time left . . . I can see right through you. You think you can do whatever you please because your father served in the US Army, isn’t that right?”
“No, Sister. Not at all, Sister.”
Madeleine’s insides were starting to cramp.
“You think that looking after the dead gives you the right to defile pictures of the saints!” the nun roared, brandishing the Hitlerized photo of Pius XII.
“I . . . it wasn’t me, Sister,” Madeleine sobbed.
“You think you’re stronger than everyone else because your father can pull the Saint-Jean-Baptiste cart along behind him? Is that it? Well, I’ve got news for you, you nitwit. The only thing that young beefcake of a father of yours is lifting nowadays is his glass of gin! Right up to Heaven! And his sins are clear for all to see in the way you behave, you little demon!”
Sister Saint Alphonse held up the holy picture of the pope, staring down at Madeleine like a chickadee considering the worm it’s about to swallow.
“Bring me that piece of paper!” she bellowed.
Madeleine walked forward while her classmates looked on in concern. Simone Dumont was biting her lip, clutching her stomach with both hands. Madeleine held out the scrap of paper and the nun snatched it with her chubby fingers. No one was laughing now. Beads of sweat were gathering on Simone Dumont’s forehead. The paper was unfolded, slowly, and read out loud.
“For always. You, me, and Lazarus. S.”
A veil of incomprehension slipped over the nun’s face. Solange’s heart was pounding.
“What’s that supposed to mean? And who is S?” the nun hissed.
A Sylvie and a Suzanne immediately proclaimed their innocence as one. Simone Dumont held her head with one hand, her stomach with the other, whimpering like a Queen of England with her head on the block. Solange couldn’t breathe.
“Sister . . . I . . .”
“Be quiet, Solange Bérubé. I’m waiting for the guilty party to step forward. For Louis Lamontagne’s daughter to own up!”
Sister Saint Alphonse shook Madeleine like a plum tree. At that very moment, soft, lazy snowflakes, the first of the season, began to fall outside. A raucous cry rose up from the schoolyard, electrifying an already charged atmosphere.
“It’s the end of the world! Repent!”
Without a thought to their teachers’ authority, the girls in every classroom overlooking the schoolyard raced to the windows. Down below, her arms stretched out in the form of a cross, Sister Mary of the Eucharist was welcoming the first snow with gales of laughter.
“Repent and say your prayers! Welcome the snowflakes that announce the end! Minutes from now, they’ll grow bigger, as big as houses, ready to punish all of humanity!”
In the upper grades, where the girls had seen through the nuns’ little charade a few days previously, laughter rang out and made its way down to the lower classes. The Grade 4 girls pressed their noses against the glass, like goldfish against the side of an aquarium. Sister Mary of the Eucharist laughed one last time.
“Don’t move! I’m coming up!” she cried.
She made her way to the covered part of the playground, leaving a trail of footprints in the snow behind her.
The girls’ faces turned as one to the front of the class, a horrible scene unfolding before them: Sister Saint Alphonse was beating Madeleine’s hands with the ruler, frantically, forcefully, feverishly. The little girl was in a trancelike state and didn’t feel a thing, taking the blows like Saint Blandina took the blows from the Roman legionaries’ swords.
“That’ll teach you!”
And on the count of twenty-five, Sister Mary of the Eucharist appeared, shaking snowflakes from her shoulders. The torturer stopped in her tracks, ruler in mid-air, hypnotized by the look on her colleague’s face. Sister Mary of the Eucharist nodded for Madeleine to go back to her seat. The little girl hadn’t shed a single tear the whole time, her mind focused on the image of Saint Blandina in the arenas of Lyon. The two nuns eyed each other. Sister Saint Alphonse lowered her gaze, then her forehead, then her chin.
“As you can see,” Sister Mary of the Eucharist told the girls, “the Good Lord has once again spared humanity. It is a quarter past eleven, and the world is still standing!”
A girl raised her hand at the back of the class.
“Sister, why isn’t it the end of the world?”
Sister Mary of the Eucharist smiled.
“Thanks to your prayers, girls. You saved yourselves. Now everyone follow me! Let’s go outside and play in the snow! I’ll see you in the schoolyard!”
The girls went outside, shrieking with joy. Sister Mary of the Eucharist had rules she lived by, and understood as well as any French-Canadian nun the mechanics of punishment and humiliation. She also knew that it was Madeleine who had drawn on the mustache. She herself had given the girl the picture of the Holy Father to add to her collection. She had recognized the picture’s slightly dog-eared edge. As to what might have driven or inspired Madeleine to give the pope a Hitler mustache, she hadn’t the faintest idea. What she did know was that Madeleine wouldn’t do it again. Once all the girls were outside, she found herself alone with Sister Fatty, who was still sweating from her efforts. She walked up to her slowly, wiped the smile off her face and pursed her lips, looking uglier than ever. Sister Saint Alphonse was trembling, stammering something inaudible. Sister Mary of the Eucharist got close enough to blow her cold, fetid breath into the other nun’s nostrils.
“If you ever lift a hand to that child again, you’ll be the one praying for the end of the world, Sister Saint Alphonse.”
Sporting her apocalyptic smile once again, she went back out to the girls frolicking in the snow. In the classroom, a fruity, fecal aroma wafted up, whirled around, and hung in the air, without Simone being in any way to blame. Having lost the battle if not the war, Sister Fatty went back to her room to change.
The snow continued to fall outside, now whipped up by a westerly wind. Sister Mary of the Eucharist walked to the church, where she met Old Ma Madeleine, come to pray for the souls in purgatory.
“Come outside with me,” she said to the old woman. “Come see this land of ours all in white!”
And both women stood outside the church of Saint-François-Xavier, straight and black in the storm, their hands in muffs, looking north in silence. The snowflakes gathered on their veils and shoulders; inexplicable smiles spread across their faces. Old Ma Madeleine spoke of snowfalls of years past.
For a long time, Sister Mary of the Eucharist had always watched the first snowfall alongside her heterozygous twin, Sister Saint Joan of Arc who, shortly after taking her vows, had volunteered as a missionary abroad.
“They were already sisters before they became sisters,” Papa Louis liked to joke, a quip that only the under-tens were able to fully appreciate.
A photo of Sister Saint Joan of Arc before she left for Japan in 1934, off to live in the Nagasaki provincial house founded by the Sisters of the Child Jesus. Right beside the armchair where Papa Louis would mix sugar into his gin as he told his stories, an art deco walnut dresser covered in framed photographs. A gloomy-looking nun in front of a Japanese home, a peach tree in bloom; the last picture of Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s twin sister, taken June 16, 1945, by a nun who was about to return to Canada. Then came the terrible pain for Sister Mary of the Eucharist, the pain that washed over her on the night of August 10, 1945, in the provincial house of Rivière-du-Loup, the night of that atomic
day. A sudden weakness come from the west, she must have thought, heartfelt sadness in her rosary. There had been no need to tell her. The lines of communication between saintly sisters have never had need for telegraphs or humanity’s other crutches. Of the pain felt by Sister Mary of the Eucharist, no portraits were painted, no pictures taken. But Irene, her niece, remembered, and every August 9 until the day she died, instead of saying grace she would tell those gathered around the table:
“She was standing there, just in front of the convent, leaning against a tree. Under the beginnings of a moon, her face was radiant, shining like a thousand suns. She didn’t cry, she didn’t laugh. She just said: ‘My little sister in Japan.’”
No one had even told her yet. And there was no way of knowing; they didn’t find out right away. It wasn’t until weeks after the atomic bomb went off that Sister Saint Joan of Arc’s death was confirmed. But Sister Mary of the Eucharist already knew. She didn’t feel it; she knew it.
And Papa Louis had confirmed it more than once himself: Sister Mary of the Eucharist shed no tears when they told her that her twin sister had died in Nagasaki.
“Sure she knew already! Why would she suddenly have burst into tears? Just for show?” he would ask, raising his finger to shoulder height and pointing it heavenward, as though to indicate an unfathomable mystery.
After that, there had been no news of Nagasaki for a long time, not until a young priest returned one day from a Canadian Christian mission in Japan with news for Sister Mary of the Eucharist. He had been to Nagasaki and spoken to people who knew the late nun, children she had helped in the Japanese countryside just before taking refuge in Nagasaki, which people were certain would never be bombed. In fact, all the local Christians had been foolish enough to flock to the city, where misfortune awaited them.
“The Americans could very well pay dearly for this affront to the Lord,” the young priest had reasoned, staring at the floor.
Strangely enough, Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s bitterness wasn’t directed at the Americans, if the severe disapproval that only nuns are capable of can even be called bitterness. No, it was the whole of Japan that she resented. In her mind, there was no denying that those godless people were guilty of a terrible crime that the Americans—Christian neighbors of impeccable hygiene, their fairness widely reputed—had been well within their rights to punish with the fires of divine wrath. Sister Mary of the Eucharist secretly cultivated a contempt for all matters relating to Japan, the Japanese, and any words or objects that might serve as a reminder of the Land of the Rising Sun, a feeling that was at odds with her commitment to the Lord, but that she nurtured with the patience and diligence with which some people will torture a bonsai. And so, when the Sisters of the Child Jesus convent decided to buy a television in 1966 to listen to and watch—yes, watch!—John XXIII’s papal address to Canada’s missionaries (the squeals that could be heard at the convent that night!), the convent’s treasurer chose an RCA model made in the United States. Sister Mary of the Eucharist was one of the convent’s first nuns to become addicted to the small screen. She would sometimes be spotted alone, kneeling before the screen, stroking its convex glass with her white hand to feel the magnetic field, a blissful smile on her face. When in 1975 the television was replaced by a Japanese model, the nun abruptly lost all interest in television programs and even begged off watching Paul VI’s funeral. She was unwell, she said. Needless to say, she would rather have traipsed four miles through the March snow than taken a ride in a Toyota, would rather have been eaten alive by a pack of sharp-toothed wolves on a winter’s night in Canada than spoken to one of the nuns who regularly came over from Japan to pay their Canadian colleagues a visit. On those days Sister Mary of the Eucharist would confine herself to the laundry room; her hatred of Japan and every sign of it had become for her an act of mortification that she knew would leave her cleansed. She never mentioned it to anyone, not even to Father Lecavalier during her confession in July 1968.
Every nun carries a little atomic crater around inside. Her own private disaster area.
And on that October day when the young missionary had come to talk about her twin sister’s final hours of suffering in Nagasaki, the sister in mourning had already taken on the waxy complexion of the irradiated, already distilled all the grief the death had caused her. Her face was green as grass; her eyes were ringed with lilac, as if they too had perished in the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sister Mary of the Eucharist had smiled at the missionary as though urging him to go on, to tell her what he knew of the people who had known her twin sister. How had she spent her final moments? Had she suffered? So many questions in just one smile! And how a priest’s words, so lovely, so poetic, so tender and soothing, can sometimes fall like drops of water on a burning stone! The young priest was sorry to have made such a long trip to deliver such a gloomy gospel. By way of reply, he gave her the photo that could now be found on Papa Louis’s art deco dresser, a copy that Irene Lamontagne (née Caron) had had printed for her eight brothers, now scattered throughout the county of Rivière-du-Loup. For all eternity, Madeleine and her brothers would remember the woman as “our aunt Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s twin sister . . . what was her name again? Marc, do you remember her first name? Yeah, I mean Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s name. No? And her twin sister? You know, the one who died in Hiroshi—no, no, Nagasaki, that’s the one. Her, the one in the photo? Caron? Yes, I know she was a Caron, but what about her first name? You don’t remember? Marie? Who kept the original photo anyway? You don’t remember either. Ah.” Sister Saint Joan of Arc’s name was quickly replaced in the family’s memory, and in the memory of all those who lived in Rivière-du-Loup, by Saint Mary of Nagasaki, a much more evocative name for the poor woman from Quebec who died in hostile territory serving her faith.
But the fact remains that the young priest, so proud to have returned from Japan to describe exactly how the nine Sisters of the Child Jesus met their deaths—not there and then, but later of radiation poisoning—once he was standing before Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who smiled at him the way the saints smile in holy pictures, kept this detail to himself. She knew. Few answers are as evocative as the one she gave the young priest on that fall morning:
“And there appeared a great wonder in Heaven; a woman clothed with the sun.”
That’s how Sister Mary of the Eucharist had imagined her twin sister’s ordeal: like the image from Revelations. The young priest wasn’t brave enough to ask what she meant.
Sister Mary of the Eucharist did not cry, but she did lose all her hair. By Christmas 1945, her head was entirely bald, and the rest of her body was completely bare, a fact that naturally no one could confirm. It meant that, even once the order of the Sisters of the Child Jesus allowed its members to wear lay clothing, the nun clung to her habit. Lacking eyebrows and eyelashes, with no down to protect her from the cold, she had a face like a moonscape, a face that many former students at the Saint-François-Xavier School in Rivière-du-Loup still see on nights when they awake with a start from disturbing dreams.
It was perhaps out of pity that Old Ma Madeleine enjoyed keeping her company as they watched the first autumn snow settle on the church grounds.
“Do you think we’ll be freed this winter?”
“I don’t think so, Madeleine. I think it’ll come with the cold. Perhaps not this year.”
“How long have we been wandering this land, Sister?”
“I stopped counting a long time ago.”
“This snow is so soft, this glacial wind such a comfort. When will we be free at last? Tell me! When will we join that sister of yours who died in Nagasaki?”
“First young Madeleine will have to leave, then come back, then leave for good. We have another few years left after that. We’ll know when the archangel visits.”
“When who visits?”
“The good-looking young man. The archangel. Everything in its time. It will be a cold night. I promise you one last winter j
ourney, Madeleine.”
The afternoon felt like no other in Solange and Madeleine’s class. Now wearing a clean habit, Sister Saint Alphonse had used cunning and psychology to make the most of the hullabaloo created by the aborted threat to end the world and the first snowfall to proceed with the weekly sale of Chinese babies. She had pinned a huge poster on the wall. It was covered in shadowy grey outlines: faces to be colored in. Chinese babies sold by the Association of the Holy Childhood for missions abroad.
“Girls, as you know, the Association of the Holy Childhood lets you save, through your generosity, the soul of a Chinese baby that would otherwise go straight to Hell. By buying a Chinese baby, you are allowing the foreign missions to baptize it and give it a soul. It will, unfortunately, remain of the Chinese race, but at least it will have a Christian soul and a Christian name, which will mean it no longer has to burn in the fires of Hell like certain other people.”
An accusing glance at Solange, then Madeleine.
“When you buy a Chinese baby,” she went on, “you will get a blue booklet if it’s a boy and a pink booklet if it’s a girl. You’ll also be given permission to color in one of the little faces on the poster. Remember that Good Saint Anne has just spared us the end of the world. Do not let her down! Last year at the end of Grade 4, it was Lucie Cotnam who bought the most. Two hundred and fifty of them! Just imagine! You’ll have your work cut out to beat her record: this year the price has gone up. Now we are to sell them at twenty-five cents, up from ten. So, girls, I’m waiting. Anyone who wants to buy a Chinese baby should raise her hand immediately!”
Buying Chinese babies was, everyone knew, a simple but expensive way of earning the nuns’ esteem, the number of smacks of the ruler being inversely proportional to the number of Chinese babies acquired over the school year. This easing-off of corporal punishment was accompanied by increased goodwill and special favors like religious books and an avalanche of holy pictures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis Xavier, the patron saint of foreign missions. What’s more, such transactions often guaranteed special privileges, like joining the nuns in their own private dining room. A sprinkling of hands went up, one or two girls from better-off families who happened to be carrying loose change. Perhaps to put the morning’s events behind her, Madeleine bought herself a little Chinese girl and bought a little Chinese boy as a present for Solange, who turned red with delight. They didn’t say a word to each other as they stood in front of the poster, coloring in their new acquisitions.