by Roch Carrier
“Don’t go to too much trouble, Mother Corriveau.”
“When there’s a dead man in the house the house shouldn’t smell of death.”
She opened the oven. The golden crust whispered at its contact with the air and a perfume that reawakened appetites spread through the kitchen. One by one the villagers got up, abandoned their prayers and Corriveau, and went into the kitchen. Mother Corriveau welcomed them with a plate on which she had put a quarter of a tourtière under a sauce made of a mixture of apples, strawberries, bilberries and currants. As for Anthyme, he was holding out a glass filled with foaming cider. For years he had been making his cider in the fall when, as he said, “The wind is ready to scratch the apples.” Then he buried his bottles in the cellar where they remained hidden in the ground for a very long time. His children became men and the bottles were still in the ground. At times, on great occasions, Anthyme would parsimoniously draw out a bottle and quickly fill in the hole so that, as he said, ’The light of the cider won’t get out.” Over the years Anthyme’s cider became charged with marvellous forces in the earth.
A bottle in each hand, Anthyme was now looking for empty glasses. When a glass was filled the old man wore a smile like God the creator.
Meanwhile, in the living room, the tide of prayers subsided; people were talking, laughing, arguing; in the kitchen they ate and drank and were happy, while Mother Corriveau looked on with brimming eyes. From time to time she wiped a tear that came as she thought of her son, loved by so many people: not only the people from the village, but also the army, which had sent a delegation of seven soldiers because her son had given his life in the war. So many people joined together for her son; Mother Corriveau could have no finer consolation. She wouldn’t have believed that her son was so well-liked.
They ate and prayed; they were thirsty and hungry; they prayed again, they smoked and drank. They had the whole night before them.
“You’re not trying to tell me there are really men like that in town!”
“You mean if our boys leave home to work in town they’ll turn into homosexuals?”
The third blew his nose too energetically; his eyes were filled with tears. “Hey, have you forgotten there’s a war on? Our boys don’t have to go off to town any more.”
The first kept to his story. “I’m telling you, I’m not lying.”
Father Anthyme arrived with his bottle of cider and filled their glasses.
“I mean it,” the first one went on, “I’ve seen two... ”
“Two what? ”
“Two homosexuals. When I went to town. Two homosexuals pushing a baby carriage.”
The three men laughed until they couldn’t stand up. They choked and chortled, they wept, they laughed till they seemed about to burst. Their faces were red. When they stopped laughing, the first man took up his story again.
“Two homosexuals. When I noticed their baby carriage I went up to them. I couldn’t believe they were taking a baby for a walk. I looked in the carriage and there inside it was a little homosexual!”
The other two were genuinely astonished. “Things are happening nowadays you wouldn’t have thought possible thirty years ago.”
“You don’t even know any more if there’s a God. There are people who say if there was a God he wouldn’t be allowing this war.”
“But there have always been wars, or it seems like it.”
“Then that means maybe there’s no God.”
“You could talk about something else,” suggested Louisiana, who had heard them even though she had been gossiping in another group. “That takes some nerve, saying there’s no God when a little boy from the village is roasting in purgatory.”
The wife of the man who had told the anecdote had heard too. “If you go on blaspheming I’m taking you home to bed, and your hands will stay on top of the covers.”
At least twelve men had a good laugh at her threat.
The man who had been caught out indicated the living room with his nose, and pointed his finger towards Corriveau. “Fatso, if it was your son in there, would you still believe there was a God? ”
“I’d believe it because He is everywhere, even in the heads of idiots like you.”
“According to you, God would be in your big tits.” Anthyme came to serve him some cider. The man drank his glassful in one gulp.
“I didn’t say there isn’t a God, and I didn’t say there is one. Me, I don’t know. If Corriveau has seen him, let him raise his hand. Me, I don’t know.”
Father Corriveau, who was listening, stupefied, with his two bottles of cider, had nothing to say. He refilled the glass.
“It’s not my child who’s in the coffin,” the man said; “it’s yours, Anthyme.”
“So it is; you shouldn’t have that trouble,” said Anthyme to the weeping man; “It’s my boy, not yours.”
“It’s not my boy in the coffin, but I wonder: if there is a God, why does he spend so much time sending children into these holes? Why, Anthyme? ”
“An old man in a coffin, I find that just as hard to look at as a young one.” Anthyme was weeping too.
The villagers were very gay. “Ha! Ha!” laughed one of them. “I’ve seen some nice behinds, some real nice ones. (Not my wife’s, of course.) So I say to myself, if there are nice behinds like that on earth, what is there going to be in Heaven?”
“What a lot of hell Corriveau’ll raise! When he was alive he was quite a rooster.”
“Father Anthyme, we haven’t got any cider!”
Mother Corriveau took more tourtières from the oven. The whole house was an oven that smelled of fat golden pork. Through this perfume floated phrases from prayers: “Salut pleine et grasse”; “Entrailles ébenies”; “Pour nous pauvres pêcheurs”, “Repas éternel”; these mingled with pungent clouds of tobacco smoke. They had to stay all night. The soldiers remained at attention, against their wall. There were distractions for the young girls as they prayed: they forgot the words of their Ave’s as they admired how handsome the soldiers were, these Anglais who didn’t have coarse, dark hairs on their cheeks but beautiful fair skin; it would be good to put their lips there.
It wasn’t human for them to stay fixed there all night, stiff and motionless. It’s not a position for the living. The Corriveaus went to offer them cider or tourtière, but the soldiers refused anything.
“Why don’t you drink a little glass of cider?” asked Anthyme.
“Have a little piece of my tourtière then,” coaxed his wife.
The Anglais didn’t budge, didn’t even answer “No” at the ends of their lips.
“They turn up their noses at our food,” thought Anthyme.
Mother Corriveau found the laughter too generous. “You’re going to wake up my son.”
“Would you like a little glass of cider?” offered Anthyme, filling the glass before he had an answer.
In the living room, they were praying: “Jesus Christ,” “So be it,” “Save us,” “The eternal flames”; they were juggling syllables, words, as they prayed, rushing through their prayers. The faster they prayed the sooner Corriveau would leave the flames of purgatory. And if he was condemned to the eternal fires of hell perhaps their prayers would ease the burning.
In the kitchen the people were talking:
“I’d bet my dog that if you climb on a woman three times a day, not counting the nights, that’s hard on the heart.”
“It’s better to kill yourself by climbing on your wife than by working.”
“Pig!”
The one who had made the accusation was a bachelor. The other reproached him. “I like people who climb on their wives better than the ones who enjoy themselves all alone like bachelors.”
The bachelor was used to this. “I prefer climbing on other men’s wives.”
The villagers roared with laughter, they belched, they swallowed mouthfuls of cider, and without retying their ties they went, by common consent, into the living room to pray. Those who were in the living
room got up and went into the kitchen, where Mother Corriveau never stopped caressing her tourtières, and Anthyme worked just as hard filling glasses with cider.
“Listen, here’s a good one.”
“I’m not in the habit of listening in on dirty stories,” insisted Anthyme, who wanted to hear the story. “But tonight, laughing a little might help me forget my sad sorrow. Losing my boy has made me suffer as much as if both my arms had been torn off. Worse, even. I can still see myself, one morning in spring. He had come home well after sunrise. His shirt was undone. It was stained with blood. A white shirt. His lip was as thick as my fist. His left eye, or maybe it was the right, was closed it was so swollen. I stood in the doorway of his bedroom and I said, ’We won’t argue. Just go back where you came from and don’t set foot in this house again, drunkard.’ He left, and he’s come back to us today.”
Anthyme could not talk any more. He was sobbing. His wife was looking at him hard, like someone who will not allow herself to be tender.
“He’s drunk too much, the dirty old man. He throws his sons out the door, but he doesn’t notice that it’s him they take after. He gives everybody cider but he doesn’t forget himself. He takes advantage of the death of his son to let himself get drunk like an animal. You old bum, you’re drunk.”
“I’m sad, wife, I’ve never been so sad.”
“Come on Anthyme, give me a little cider and don’t cry. What the good Lord has taken away he’ll give you back a hundredfold.”
“At my age, you know I can’t make another boy. Not with my wife, anyway… ”
“Drink a little faster, Father Anthyme, and listen to my story.”
“My wife doesn’t want me to drink.”
“You’re too sad. It’s bad luck to be as sad as you are. You need a little distraction. Listen to this; it’s a good one…Once there was…”
The raconteur put his arm around Anthyme’s shoulders and told him, in a tone confidential enough to attract the curious: “Once a young girl from town came to my place, a cousin of mine. She asked if she could milk a cow. Sit on my little stool, I told her; you know what to do? — Yes. I went on to something else. I came back five minutes later. She was still sitting beside the cow, tickling the tits with the ends of her fingers, caressing them tenderly. Would you mind telling me what you’re doing there? I asked her. — I’m making them hard, Uncle.”
They laughed heartily till they choked; they struck their thighs and punched one another. They had never heard such a funny story. Anthyme had tears in his eyes, and laugh! right now he was laughing so hard, shaking so much, that he was spilling cider on the floor.
“You’re going to kill me,” he said.
And he went on to another group where the thirst was great. In the living room, on Corriveau’s coffin, the candleflame was clinging stubbornly.
Anthyme Corriveau found himself again, after he had served the drinks, in front of the storyteller, who was proud of his success and still enjoying it.
“Father Anthyme, that story was told to me by your son. He should be laughing at it with us.”
“Oh!” said Anthyme, “he shouldn’t want to laugh.”
Mother Corriveau was still cooking her tourtières. She was soaked in sweat as though she had been caught in a storm. She was tearing around the stove. Feeling something sticking into her breast she stuck her hand into her bodice. She had forgotten, in her grief, the letter the sergeant had presented to her when he arrived.
“Anthyme,” she ordered, drawing the letter out from between her breasts, “come here. I forgot.”
She waved the letter.
“Come here. I’ve got a letter from my boy.”
“From our boy,” Anthyme corrected. “Open it. Hurry up.”
Because of this letter Corriveau was alive. They forgot that their child was lying in his coffin. The old lady feverishly tore open the envelope. It wasn’t true that he was dead; he had written. The letter would correct the facts. The villagers spread the word from one group to the next that the Corriveaus had received a letter from their son. They continued to laugh, to eat, to drink, to pray. Mother Corriveau started slowly to puzzle out the letter that had been found in her son’s pocket.
“My dearest parents,
I won’t write you very much because I have to keep my steel helmet on my head and if I think too hard the heat could melt my helmet and then it wouldn’t protect me very well. The socks mother sent me are really warm. Give me news about my brothers. Have any of them got themselves killed? As for my sisters, they’re probably still washing their dishes and diapers. I’d rather get a shell in the rear than think about all that. I’ve won a decoration; it’s nice. The more decorations you have, the farther you stay from the Germans.” (Everyone insisted, so Mother Corriveau started reading this part again.) “I’ve won a decoration… ”
Father Corriveau, amazed, snatched the letter from his wife and proclaimed, pushing people around in his excitement, “My boy got a decoration! My boy won a decoration!”
From all their hearts, from the bottoms of the hearts of those who were praying and those who were drinking, a hymn was raised up that made the ceiling shake:
Il a gagné ses épaulettes
Maluron malurette
Il a gagné ses épaulettes
Maluron maluré.
Eventually the feast spread to the living room too. The flag covering Corriveau’s coffin became a tablecloth where plates and glasses were left and cider was spilled. People sitting at the kitchen table leaned against a wall because it was hard to keep your balance with a plate in one hand, a glass of cider in the other, fat from the tourtière streaming down cheeks and chin; or they kept their heads high and dry on a pile of greasy dishes, or else standing in the doorway which was open to the snow and cold, they tried to vomit to get rid of their dizziness; or they put both hands on Antoinette’s generous backside or tried to see through the wool covering Philomène’s breasts; and they ate juicy tourtière in the living room, in the odour of the candles which were going out, and they prayed in the heavy odour of the kitchen where the smell of grease mingled with that of the sweat of the men and women.
They prayed: “Sainte-Marie pleine et grasse, le seigneur, avez-vous? Entrez toutes les femmes… ”
These people did not doubt that their prayer would be understood. They prayed with all their strength as men, all their strength as women who had borne children. They did not ask God for Corriveau to come back on earth; they begged God quite simply not to abandon him for too long in the flames of purgatory. Corriveau couldn’t be in hell. He was a boy from the village, and it would have seemed unfair to these villagers for one of their children to be condemned to the eternal flames. Perhaps some people deserved a very long time in purgatory, but no one really deserved hell.
Amélie had come with Arthur while Henri, her deserter husband, remained cowering in his attic, well protected by the heavy trunks slid across the trapdoor.
“In purgatory the fire doesn’t hurt as much as in hell. You know that you can get out of purgatory; you think of that while you’re burning. Then the fire doesn’t bite so bad. So let us pray for the fire of purgatory to purify Corriveau. Hail Mary… ”
Amélie strung all her prayers end to end, formulas learned at school, responses from her little catechism, and she felt that she was right.
“Let us pray again,” she said.
How could a woman leading a dishonest life with two men in her house be so pious? How could she explain supernatural things about religion and hell with so much wisdom? Despite her impure life Amélie was a good woman. Occasions like this evening were fortunate, people would say: you have to have deaths and burials from time to time to remember the goodness of people. The villagers felt a great warmth in their hearts: it wasn’t possible that there was a hell. To imaginations steeped in pork fat and cider, the flames of hell were scarcely bigger than the candleflames on Corriveau’s coffin. The flames could not burn through all eternity; all the fir
es they were familiar with were extinguished after a certain time: fires made to clear the land, or wood fires, or the fires of love. An eternal flame seemed impossible. Only God is eternal, and as Corriveau was a boy from the village where people are good despite their weaknesses, he would not stay long in purgatory. They would bring him out through the strength of their prayers: perhaps he was out even now.
“Memento domine domini domino…”
“Requiescat in pace! ”
Mother Corriveau was still filling the plates held out to her like starving mouths; in the cellar Anthyme was unearthing new bottles of cider.
The Anglais were at attention, impassive, like statues. Even their eyes did not move. Nobody noticed them. They were part of the decor, like the windows, the lamps, the crucifix, the coffin, the furniture. If someone had observed them up close he would have noticed a gesture of disdain at the edges of their nostrils and the creases of their lips.
“What a bunch of savages, these French Canadians!”
They neither moved nor looked at one another. They were made of wood. They didn’t even sweat.
Hands in their pockets, Jos and Pit, the latter leaning against the coffin, were chatting. “That damn Corriveau, I’d like to know what he’s thinking about in his coffin with all these women prowling around him.”
“There are lots of women going to cry when he’s buried.”
“Some of them are going to be dreaming about a ghost with soft hands.”
“Me, I’ll stick my hand in shit if he hasn’t undressed at least twenty-two of the women here: Amélie, Rosalia, Alma, Théodelia, Joséphine Arthurise, Zélia…”
“So where does that get him?” Jos cut in: “Now Corriveau’s lying between his four boards all by himself. He won’t get up again.”
“Albina,” Pit continued, “Leopoldine, Patricia, then your wife…”
“What are you talking about, Calvaire? ”
“I’m telling the truth.”
Before he had pronounced the last syllable Pit received a fist in his teeth. He fell over backwards among the plates and glasses, onto Corriveau’s coffin. The soldiers moved forward in unison, took hold of the two men, threw them out the open door into the snow, and returned to take up their post again.