Copyright

HarperVia

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2020

Originally published as La fiancée américaine in Canada in 2012 by Marchand de feuilles

Originally published in English as Songs for the Cold of Heart in 2018 by QC Fiction, an imprint of Baraka Books

Copyright © Éric Dupont 2020

English language translation © Peter McCambridge

Cover design by Stephen Brayda

Cover art by Kai McCall

Éric Dupont asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008384142

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008384159

Version: 2020-02-03

Dedication

To my big sister, for her winter travels.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Teal

A Black Eye is Watching You

The Neighbor

A New Confessor

Call Her Venise

The Book Thief

Magdalena Berg’s First Notebook

Roman Epistles

The Königsberg Zebra

Magdalena Berg’s Second Notebook

Magdalena Berg’s Third Notebook

America Forever

Confessions of a Diva

Epilogue

A Note from the Translator

About the Author

About the Publisher

Teal

YEARS BEFORE HER mother bundled her onto a bus bound for New York City in a blizzard, Madeleine Lamontagne had been a little girl who loved Easter bunnies, Christmas trees, and the stories told by her dad, Louis Lamontagne. After all, everyone loved to hear Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne’s tall tales.

As any drinking man in Rivière-du-Loup will tell you, it was TV that killed the Horse, not the combustion engine. They’ll also tell you—and there’s no reason to doubt them—that any man’s story, wherever he may be, never finds a more attentive ear than his daughter’s, especially if she is the oldest and as such occupies a special place in her father’s heart. All of which is to say that Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne, or Papa Louis as the children liked to call him, had the full regard of his little Madeleine, sitting right there on the sofa in her father’s funeral home on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, in the parish of the same name, in the town of Rivière-du-Loup in the province of Quebec.

Amid the 1950s furniture stood a ghastly ashtray mounted on an honest-to-goodness moose leg. A cousin had made it after carving up the carcass of the animal that Papa Louis had killed in the fall of 1953, when Madeleine was just three years old. She was now eight. Papa Louis was sitting in his armchair, and her two brothers on the bottle-green sofa. In her left hand, she held a full glass of gin that Papa Louis was eyeing thirstily.

“Get a move on, Mado! We wanna hear the story!”

It was Madeleine Lamontagne’s oldest brother Marc, age seven, who had just told his sister to hurry up and get Papa Louis another drink so the story could at last begin. The other brother, Luc, watched a dust mote drift through the air.

“Cut it out!” Madeleine retorted before sitting down to his right.

Marc slid his hand in under her thigh. She twisted his finger back, just enough to get her point across, but he slipped his hand back under her thigh, and this time she let him. “His fingers must be cold,” Madeleine reasoned, thinking that if she picked a fight with her brother, Papa Louis might suddenly decide to send them all off to bed. Fortunately, Marc turned his attentions away from her and watched Papa Louis knock back his second gin. To Marc’s left, little Luc, his dark-haired head leaning against his big brother’s frail shoulder, was about to fall asleep. Luc, age five, had come into the world the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II: June 2, 1953. The sofa was almost full, but there would have been room for the cat if their mother Irene had allowed it.

“No cat on the sofa. It’s not hygienic,” she had decreed one day.

There had been cake for supper. Luc had eaten too much of it—he had eaten Madeleine’s share as well as his own—only to vomit it back up all over his brother Marc. So Luc was already in his PJs. Madeleine had changed him out of his dirty clothes; their older brother had had to get cleaned up. Little Luc was nodding off, but maybe the dead man in the adjoining parlor would find the story entertaining.

“Tell the one about the dune!” whined Marc.

“I told you that one last month,” said Papa Louis as he emptied a spoonful of sugar into his warm gin.

“Tell it again then!”

“Don’t you want to hear a Christmas story instead? Hang on! We’ll ask the dead guy what he wants to hear! Hey, Sirois! Wanna hear a Christmas story?”

The children fought back giggles. Papa Louis only fooled around with his customers when his wife Irene wasn’t around; she found his jokes to be in terribly poor taste. Papa Louis took Sirois’s silence as a formal request for a Christmas story, appropriately enough in a room still decked out for the nativity. A scrawny fir tree was still standing, its lower branches providing shelter to a porcelain crèche whose figurine of Saint Joseph had a chip missing from its face. On the radio playing softly in the background, the family rosary ticked by with the regularity of a Swiss timepiece . . . full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus . . . Once a month, when the time for the family rosary came around, Papa Louis would find himself alone with his three children while his wife Irene went off to visit an aunt who was a nun at the Sisters of the Child Jesus convent. Since he was supposed to be reciting the interminable rosary with them, he preferred to keep the wireless on. It was a cunning plan since the valves took at least five minutes to warm up. By leaving the radio playing softly on the walnut dresser right beside him, Papa Louis would always have enough time to throw himself to his knees if, by some misfortune or other, his wife were to come home early from the convent. Papa Louis had given the kids strict instructions: at the first sound of footsteps on the wooden staircase, everyone was to throw themselves to their knees in front of the radio and pretend to swoon with emotion. Or else that would be the end of his stories. And so it was with the rosary playing in the background that Papa Louis would always start telling his children stories. One time it had happened. Irene Lamontagne had come home early to collect a coat she wanted to donate to the nuns. Papa Louis’s plan had gone like clockwork. At the first thud on the steps, Papa Louis cranked up the radio, the cardinal’s voice reverberating so hard off the living-room walls it could probably be heard outside on the street. The father and children fell to their knees, rosary beads in hand, already intoning a Hail Mary, eyes half closed as though in a spiritual trance. Madeleine prayed especially fervently, stressing each syllable: “. . . born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried . . .” adopting the nasal tone she had learned at the convent. She might have laid it on a little thick, but the ploy worked like a charm. Irene opened the door without a sound, not wanting to disturb the touching scene of family devotion. She crept upstairs to collect the forgotten garment and, index finger pressed against her lips, crossed herself as she left in silence. When he realized he was out of harm’s way, Papa Louis turned down the radio, sat back up on the armchair, picked up the glass of gin he had hidden behind the dresser, and sighed.

“Keep going! What happened to the Lady with the Big Melons?” Madeleine and Marc had chorused.

Once a month, the children got to hear a fantastically fabulous story from Papa Louis, like the time he had narrowly beaten Manitoba Bill—the Blackfoot with the blue eyes—at arm-wrestling, or the tall tale about the Saint-Jean-Baptiste night when he had danced with the Lady with the Big Melons on the Trans-Canada Highway on the far side of Saint-Antonin. Madeleine was expecting to hear for a second time how one evening he had ended up by mistake at the Malecite reserve and how the Indians, stunned at the sight of the remarkable Louis, had grown angry, because you can’t just pop up on people’s doorsteps unannounced. There would be a price to pay, and that price would be to dance with the Lady with the Big Melons. If he hadn’t, Papa Louis would never have made it back from his trip to New Brunswick alive! Not a chance! But he wasn’t going to tell them the one about the Lady with the Big Melons, because the last time he’d done that, little Luc had delivered a flawless summary to their mother; not with all the juicy details, admittedly, like the actual size of her melons, which the child had felt compelled, following the example of his father, to mime with his hands, but at the very least the circumstances leading to the events of that evening (and the accompanying hand gestures). Irene Lamontagne had been forced to go to confession, and to appeal to what remained of Papa Louis’s common sense so that in future he might leave the juiciest details out of his stories.

“Do you want them to go around telling that story at school, Louis Lamontagne?”

Irene had gotten her husband to agree that he would tell other stories, though the damage had been done. Luc would remain a rather vulgar child until the end of his short existence. But that evening, Papa Louis wanted to tell a Christmas story. The children were surprised because Papa Louis’s stories usually didn’t touch on religion. Those kinds were the exclusive preserve of Irene Lamontagne and Sister Mary of the Eucharist—better known as Sister Scary—a figure cloaked in black and white who, two or three times a year on a Sunday afternoon, would glide silently into their home on Rue Saint-François-Xavier.

It was probably Marc who—like father, like son—was the first to call her Sister Scary, because she always appeared when least expected and without making the slightest sound. You turned around and bam! There she was! Sister Mary of the Eucharist would suddenly rise up in front of you, an unnerving shadow in the doorway, beneath the clock, sitting outside on the wooden porch, or on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. The ghostly Sister Mary of the Eucharist also seemed to have a gift for being everywhere at once. Regulars at the Ophir bar on Rue Lafontaine would say they had seen her stepping onto a train at such and such a time, while others would swear she had been standing outside the church of Saint-François-Xavier at the very same moment. The Lamontagne children were about to learn, on that December evening in 1958, why exactly Sister Scary would come to pay homage to Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne three or four times a year, most often shortly before Corpus Christi, a day or two after All Saints’ Day, and on or around the feast of Saint Blaise, the patron saint of throat ailments.

In the living room on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, Papa Louis straightened himself to his full height and raised an index finger.

“I will tell you, at last, how your father came into this world. Because we’ve had it up to here with all those nun stories.”

Papa Louis glanced back at the door, to be sure his wife hadn’t slipped in silently just in time to receive the full brunt of the blasphemy. The silence lasted for two seconds while Papa Louis hoped an angel would come down and erase from his children’s memories his jab at the Sisters of the Child Jesus, whom in reality he considered almost real sisters. He waved his empty gin glass under Madeleine’s nose so she could run to fill it again, adding just the right amount of warm water. “I’ll speak up so you can hear me from the kitchen,” he promised, giving her a peck on the cheek. Madeleine poured the gin and warm water into the glass, devoting her full attention to the story so as not to miss a single word.

“I’m going to tell you the story of my birth!” began Papa Louis, slapping his knee.

“You weren’t born in Rivière-du-Loup?” inquired Marc, who thought there was nothing left to be said once a person’s place of birth had been revealed.

“I was, but back then it was called Fraserville.”

Papa Louis was a little Baby Jesus. It was a well-known fact. But his mother—known as Madeleine the American, not to be confused with Old Ma Madeleine and all the other Madeleines that came after the arrival of this particular ancestor on Canadian soil—and his father, Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne, well, they had no advance warning. Everyone thought Papa Louis would be born long after the three kings had come and gone.

The story was going to be a good one, there was no doubt about it, what with their mother out, another warm gin on its way, and that holiday feeling in the air. The signs were all there. “’Twas Decemburr 1918 an erryone was dyin ah Spanish flu. Fullin like flies, they was,” he went on in the language that people of Madeleine’s generation were the last to understand perfectly and that there would be no point reproducing here in its exactitude, since so many turns of phrase would only bewilder minds used to the standardized tongue we speak as an official language in this land.

Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne and his wife Madeleine the American were expecting their first child during that glacial, silent Lower St. Lawrence winter. “Why was Grandma Madeleine called ‘the American’? And why are the ladies in your stories always called Madeleine?”

The question came from the kitchen. And a good one it was, too. Why was Madeleine Lamontagne—mother to Papa Louis and grandmother to Madeleine Lamontagne—known colloquially as “the American”? Quite simply because she came from the United States. But beneath the innocent tone of this perfectly reasonable question, Papa Louis sensed that his children could no longer distinguish between members of their lineage—the result of a Lamontagne family obsession with always having at least one living Madeleine in their ranks. And kids are like that: they want to understand everything and are forever forcing storytellers to go back further in their stories and justify what just happened. Or was it nothing more than a clever ploy to push bedtime back further?

“My father, my dad, was Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne. My mother was Madeleine the American. It’s not hard to wrap yer head around!”

“But the other Madeleine?” groaned Marc, perplexed.

“Well, there’s Madeleine your big sister!” Papa Louis shot back.

“No, no, there was another one,” the boy insisted.

“Ah! Old Ma Madeleine, my grandmother. Louis-Benjamin’s mom. The one who, quite by accident, brought the American to Canada!”

“What was that Madeleine called?”

“Well, just like your sister! ‘Madeleine’ is what we called her!” he said with a loud guffaw that warmed the ears of his daughter, who had just set his hot gin down on the arm of his chair. She rolled her eyes. Papa Louis softened.

“We’ll call her Old Ma Madeleine so as not to make a mystery out of nothing. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to follow it all. I’ll draw you a picture if I have to.”

Madeleine Lamontagne—a.k.a. Old Ma Madeleine, mother to Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne, grandmother to Louis Lamontagne and great-grandmother to Madeleine Lamontagne—wanted her son Louis-Benjamin, born January 14, 1900, to marry a Madeleine, like his father before him.

“The Lamontagnes need one Madeleine every generation,” she had proclaimed.

The story was repeated several times throughout the childhood of Louis-Benjamin, the first baby to be baptized in the twentieth century in the church of Saint-Patrice following a shorter-than-usual mass. The boy came to understand relatively early in life that he would be better off marrying a Madeleine than a Josephine, and so, in the springtime of his life, when he became, like other boys his age, more acutely aware of the song of the black-capped chickadees, he felt the urge to marry a Madeleine. It wasn’t that this particular spring arrived any more or less quickly than the others, but it was—let’s put it this way, because Luc is not quite asleep yet—the spring when every boy comprehends the precise nature of his aspirations and when the words to the hit songs of the day begin to take on a whole new meaning.

The day Old Ma Madeleine surprised her oldest, ahem, swashbuckling behind a stack of firewood, his black tuft of hair rocking left and right like a woodpecker’s head, she realized the time had come to find him a Madeleine of his own.

Old Ma Madeleine’s choice fell upon a sickly, weak-lunged young thing by the name of Madeleine Lévesque, who had the distinct advantage of being her niece. The young lady from Kamouraska had no sooner given her consent than the parish priest gave his own. He signed in December 1917, and the records of the parish of Saint-François-Xavier leave no doubt: it was the third time that month that special permission was given for first cousins to marry. The engagement party was held on January 1, 1918; Madeleine Lévesque’s funeral, in Latin, on the fifteenth of that same month. The Spanish flu had taken the girl in less than a week as it decimated the villages along the coast. But Old Ma Madeleine took this fateful blow as a challenge thrown down to her by God himself.

“Son, your mother won’t let you down. I’ll find your Madeleine. Even if it means rowing across to the lands your German forefathers left behind.”

Old Ma Madeleine recalled that a younger brother had left Canada for New Hampshire in 1909 and had once mentioned in a letter the existence of a little Madeleine he had adopted in the town of Nashua, the orphan of a French-Canadian couple. Might the little girl already be of child-bearing age? She must be at least sixteen by now . . . Old Ma Madeleine had the priest write her a letter in which she asked for news of her younger brother, wondering, at the very end, if young Madeleine might not be, by any chance, ready to start a family. She enclosed a recent photograph of Louis-Benjamin, his cowlick standing straight up across his forehead, his ears sticking out a little, his fleshy lips pressed into a little wave. Looking positively thirsty for affection. The letter was mailed on January 17, 1918. The answer was not long coming. On March 1, Father Cousineau of the parish of Saint-François-Xavier knocked on Old Ma Madeleine’s wooden door. He held in his hand a distressing telegram sent from New Hampshire the previous day and announcing the arrival of a certain Madeleine from the United States. She was to be picked up at Fraserville station tomorrow.

“Tomorrow, that’s today?” Old Ma Madeleine asked slowly.

“Yes, tomorrow means today,” squawked the priest.

Marc loved it when his father quoted the characters in his stories verbatim, wondering all the while how he could be sure of the words since he hadn’t even been born that freezing morning of March 1, 1918, when the parish priest threw up his arms at the imminent arrival of a bride sent by railroad. He figured Papa Louis probably made up the odd bit to keep things interesting. Old Ma Madeleine and the priest stood staring at each other for a minute on the wooden steps outside the Lamontagne home, she thinking this was more than she had bargained for, he wondering how it was all going to end. Time did not afford them the luxury of putting together a little scheme to delay the bride’s arrival. The train would arrive that same evening. Upon hearing the news, Louis-Benjamin, terrified yet delighted, felt an electric current surge through him. By this time, his belle must already be on Canadian soil. With a little luck, they would be gazing upon the same star barely minutes before meeting.

Old Ma Madeleine, her oldest son Louis-Benjamin, her other son, Napoleon, his four sisters, so small that the youngest could barely stand, and Father Cousineau stood shivering at Fraserville station. The father of the Lamontagne household hadn’t been able to make it back from the logging camp where he was working all winter. Every screech of the locomotive sent shivers through Louis-Benjamin’s body, in parts that until then had not been overly insistent, that is, no more so than he had become accustomed to. He was poised to discover the extent of this inclination just as soon as the train from Quebec City pulled into the station. He felt the ground begin to shudder underfoot as the locomotive ground to a halt, a glistening beast in the dark night. A century passed before the car doors opened, spilling out somberly dressed passengers, a handful of Sisters of the Child Jesus holding each other by the arm so as not to slip on the damp ice, and men returning home from their work in the capital, shivering shadows half asleep.

The American girl kept them waiting. Outside the station, flanked by her horde of kids, clutching her youngest children tightly underneath her coat to shelter them from the cold like a penguin on an ice floe, Old Ma Madeleine was ready and waiting for the devil himself to step off the train. All the expressions a person’s face can bear when they know they are about to meet their destiny were on display from left to right. Once they concluded there had been a mistake, that the priest had misread the telegram or else the American girl had missed her train, talk turned to which road they should take back home.

She stepped out of the third car, carrying a single leather suitcase in her right hand and a box in her left. She wore a beaver fur hat and a long fur coat, the fur ripped from an animal that Old Ma Madeleine could not identify at first glance, but that later turned out to be a marten. The young woman looked right, then left, the cloud of steam produced by her mouth following her head’s movements in the pale light of an uncertain moon and the locomotive’s headlamp. The priest took the initiative of casting out into the night air the traveler’s first name, a cue to which she promptly responded. The creature then approached the welcoming committee, which could now make out her features. Madeleine the American had pale skin that was covered in freckles, even in the middle of winter. She removed her gloves to extend her hand like a lady. Louis-Benjamin, who must have been a good two heads taller than she was, had never seen a hand so white nor eyes more teal. In fact, he had never really seen teal-colored eyes before. The American girl smiled at him, deducing this must be the boy promised her at the end of the long journey. Judging by her smile, everyone understood it to be a done deal. Louis-Benjamin, a big strapping lad of six foot six, looked the little lady from the South up and down; his mother had parted his hair to the left, as she did for high masses, and ironed him a clean shirt made from warm fabric already soaking wet beneath his long beaver coat.

With a wave in his hair that, on particularly windy days, transformed into a small tuft, with the long eyelashes inherited from his mother, with shoulders as broad as an ox, with his pale complexion and cheeks turned rosy by the cold, the young man, had he not already been promised to the American lass, would have had no trouble at all finding a wife for himself from among Fraserville’s six thousand souls. The catch was that she had to be called Madeleine, a condition that disqualified the vast majority of admirers at a time when, as Papa Louis put it, “No one ever dreamed of changing their name.”

“You were born Louis, you died Louis. Not like young what’s-her-name. That Norma one who calls herself Marilyn for the movies. Anyhow, if the girls of Fraserville had known that just by changing their name the way Fraserville changed its name to Rivière-du-Loup in 1920 they would have stood a chance of catching young Louis-Benjamin’s eye, well they’d all have changed their names to Madeleine overnight. He was a good-looking young lad, was your grandpa!”

And yet Papa Louis had been through his fair share of name changes himself. Papa Louis might have been born Louis Lamontagne, but then he became Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne—the name everyone throughout the region respectfully called him as soon as he started performing public feats of strength—then, once tamed by Irene Caron, Papa Louis it was until the day he died. Between “The Horse” and Papa Louis, there had been, depending on where he found himself, other nicknames: The Incredible Lamontagne, Cheval Lamontagne, The Great Canadian, and others that had never reached his ears. But he was still yet to be born in his own story.

“Papa, it’s complicated enough as it is . . .”

And so it was a bolt out of the blue, or its Nordic equivalent, a Northern Light, that marked the first encounter between the sturdy Lamontagne boy and Madeleine the American as she took from her purse the photograph of Louis-Benjamin sent by Old Ma Madeleine. The American looked down at the photo, then up at its model, then back down from the model to her photo. Her face lit up as though she had just seen an apparition. With not a thought for good manners or the rules of etiquette, Louis-Benjamin scooped up the traveler as if to see how much she weighed, like he did with his cousins and sisters several times a day to build his strength, the little girls having become something akin to living dumbbells that had only to be caught as they ran by. Louis-Benjamin held his new bride tight against him, because this was the girl he would marry, the doubt in his mind having several minutes ago given way to a certainty as implacable as winter, as strong as the squall from the east that had just picked up in the starry night. The bride’s feet floated a foot off the ground, like those of an angel in flight. During the warm but brief embrace, Madeleine felt through her marten fur coat precisely why she had been summoned from so far away. When he set her back down onto the ice, a giggle could be heard; then Madeleine said in the prettiest New England accent:

“I see you’re happy to meet me.”

She spoke English. Old Ma Madeleine coughed, cleared her throat, and inquired:

“Vous parlez français, Mademoiselle?”

By way of response, the young lady twirled around three times, gazed up into the starry sky, and sang in a thick American accent: “À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener . . .” Jaws dropped to the floor. Father Cousineau piped up in English. He explained to the girl that she must be on the wrong car: they were waiting for “a French girl” promised to “this young Catholic man.” The young Catholic man felt as though his heart was about to burst through his ribcage and explode into the March night. Madeleine was still laughing. She produced a letter from her purse and handed it to the priest.

My dear sister,

We were glad to hear from you. Your letter arrived yesterday. We were sad to learn that Louis-Benjamin lost his bride. We understand his grief and sorrow. The flu is also killing many here in New Hampshire. Thank you for your good intentions for our little Madeleine. You are right. We adopted her in 1909 after the death of her parents, who were from the Beauce region in Canada. She will make a perfect little wife for your Louis-Benjamin. She is very happy to go live in the land of her natural and adoptive parents. She was baptized in the one true Church and still understands the French from back home. She will turn seventeen this spring, and I told her all the men in the family make good husbands. I entrust her into your care and into the care of your son, whom I imagine to be as fine a person as you are, my dear sister. May they be very happy together in our beautiful Canada!

Your brother, Alphonse

Illiterate though she might have been, Old Ma Madeleine demanded to see the piece of paper as if able to detect some detail the priest had missed.

“It’s not exactly what I was expecting!”

Louis-Benjamin paid no heed to the details. He was already tossing the American girl’s bags up into the priest’s sled, followed by his sisters, one by one, like bales of hay. He plunked the American lass down between two of the girls to keep her warm. The journey to the lower end of town went by in a silence that held a different meaning for each of the sled’s occupants.

Back at the Lamontagne home, Old Ma Madeleine required all her maternal authority to separate Louis-Benjamin from his bride—as he now considered her—come bedtime. They realized, after dropping the priest off at the presbytery, that the young woman did indeed understand French, but there was absolutely no way she had been born into a French-Canadian family that had recently immigrated to the United States. Where did her red hair come from? And the freckles and teal eyes?

“She looks more like a Scotch!” Old Ma Madeleine had remarked in a fit of pique.

Scotch, English, or Irish, the newcomer was clearly of Nordic descent. All she would ever say on the matter was that she had been born in New Hampshire in 1900, she was as old as the century, and she had been adopted by a French-Canadian family at the age of nine, which led people to believe she was probably Irish Catholic because the Americans would never have put a little Protestant girl in the hands of a hopelessly papist French-Canadian family.

In Fraserville, news of the American girl’s arrival spread like syphilis through a Berlin whorehouse. Fraserville was never one to pass up on a bit of gossip. The finest idle tongues from up and down the town relayed the tale like an Olympic torch. After the inevitable laughter sparked by the story of the young girl’s arrival in response to a simple letter from Old Ma Madeleine inquiring if a daughter-in-law might possibly be available, each had his or her own interpretation of events. And so it was that a great many extravagant rumors did the rounds about Madeleine the American, only three of which survived until that night of December 28, 1958, in Papa Louis’s living room.

According to the first version of the story peddled in the parish of Saint-François-Xavier, the Lamontagnes had fallen victim to a dastardly plot hatched by Old Ma Madeleine’s brother. There must have been vengeful thoughts behind it, because who sends his own daughter, adopted or not, hundreds of miles away into the arms of a stranger? The young woman must have been insufferable; her adoptive parents had jumped at the first chance they got to be rid of her once and for all. Now who knew what might happen? And Louis-Benjamin would be left to pick up the tab.

The second version of the story, perhaps a little more refined and more shrouded in mystery, cast Madeleine the American in the role of a woman of passion, flitting from one widower to the next unsuspecting bachelor, amassing inheritances and leaving funeral processions and grieving families in her wake. She had, of course, stolen Old Ma Madeleine’s letter at the post office, before having someone pen a reply to take in the Lamontagnes. Old Ma Madeleine would have only to perform the usual checks by telegraph in order to be clear in her own mind and be rid of the parasite. In its darkest versions, this story prophesied an accidental death for Louis-Benjamin in the near future. All bets were off.

And finally, more twisted minds ascribed darker intentions to the little schemer. Probably a lady of the night, she had, they said, met Madeleine the American on the train, made sure she was well and truly out of the picture (there’s just no stopping those kinds of vermin), and taken her belongings to organize the whole sorry sham. The rest was nothing but theater and strength of conviction. No matter, uniformed men would soon be arriving to write an epilogue to the improbable tale.

“No one ever got to the bottom of it,” sighed Papa Louis, staring at his glass of gin.

The following day, March 2, Old Ma Madeleine wrote to her brother Alphonse, demanding an explanation for the previous evening’s events. Who was this girl? Had he really sent her packing to a foreign land without even inquiring as to the worth of young Louis-Benjamin? Was the young lady really that docile? Was he absolutely certain he had made the right decision? In the meantime, the American girl would have to be housed somewhere. Neither the Sisters of the Good Shepherd nor the Sisters of the Child Jesus had room for the poor thing. As for the priest, it was out of the question that he put up such a strange creature about whom virtually nothing was known and from whom the most surprising revelations might well be expected. And so the Lamontagnes resolved to let her stay with them. From the day after she arrived, the girl began to behave in a most unusual manner. First of all, she confirmed by way of a particularly nasal early morning rosary that she was indeed of the true faith. Then, every morning at the crack of dawn, she would cook dishes the Lamontagnes were not in the least used to. On the first day, she went to the general store for provisions since it appeared she had brought a modest dowry with her from the United States. On the second morning, she set to work in the kitchen, humming all the while a heartwarming song for the cold of heart:

Will you love me all the time?

Summer time, winter time.

Will you love me rain or shine?

As I love you?

Will you kiss me every day?

Will you miss me when away?

Will you stay at home and play?

When I marry you?

The little waltz in three-quarter time was so catchy that it stayed in your head for hours after hearing it. Papa Louis sang it for his audience, which was beginning to shrink as time ticked on. Luc was now asleep, collapsed on top of his brother Marc, who was himself fighting a battle of epic proportions against Morpheus. Madeleine, eyes wide as saucers, was gripped by the tale of horses and deadly epidemics and entirely under the storyteller’s spell. She hummed along to the American girl’s song, which their father sang to them in their little beds at night. The whole of America, a whole century, used to fall asleep to this lullaby that sang of worry, doubt, promises, and love.

Marc watched his sister Madeleine’s head nod gently as she began to drift off. He was suddenly gripped by a terrible fear: Papa Louis, realizing his audience was asleep, would bring his story to an end so that he wouldn’t have to pick it up again the following week. The boy was dying to hear what happened to his grandparents next.

“Madeleine, go make Papa Louis a gin!” he cried, shaking his sister like a plum tree.

Madeleine went off to mix the toddy.

“But what did the American girl cook?”

The question came, once again, from the kitchen.

“Breakfast. Pancakes, beans, fried eggs, you name it! And the people of Fraserville had never known the like of it,” Papa Louis replied, gazing off into the distance.

The American had gotten it into her head that the way to Canadians’ hearts was through their stomachs. But she would have her work cut out for her. Without ever having read it, she knew full well the contents of the letter Old Ma Madeleine had dictated to the parish priest the day after she had arrived. They would have to be won over one by one, calorie by calorie, carb by carb . . . On the third day, the American girl baked a sandwich loaf that relegated Old Ma Madeleine’s bread to the rank of mere ship’s biscuit. That American bread was white and fluffy as a cloud. It caressed Louis-Benjamin’s lips like the wings of a dove. On the fourth day, the girl baked hot cross buns topped with caramelized sugar. Their aroma alone had the young man foaming at the mouth from the woodshop where, as Old Michaud’s apprentice, he crafted small, simple pieces of furniture to order for the people of Fraserville. Cribs more than anything else. And always to the melody of Will you love me all the time?, which the parish priest had agreed, after much beseeching and imploring, to translate, whispering into his ear so that people would not think he had succumbed to an unspeakable, unnatural vice before the handsome Louis-Benjamin. The aroma of the hot cross buns, the American girl’s red hair, the baby cribs, Will you love me all the time? . . . It was all enough to make his head spin. The poor boy, who had never known the torments of love, was so distracted he flattened his thumb with a hammer. The cry of a wounded animal reverberated from one side of the St. Lawrence to the other. On the north shore, people thought it was the cry of a drowning man, and a search was launched on the snow-covered ice of the enormous river for the poor devil who had fallen into the water.

But the drowning man was Louis-Benjamin . . .

“Drowning in an ocean of love!” exclaimed Papa Louis, beating out each syllable with his left hand on the arm of his chair.

On the sofa, the peals of laughter from Madeleine and Marc were almost enough to stir Sirois from the dead. Luc remained buried in his impenetrable sleep, his body occasionally convulsed by a passing bad dream.

Old Michaud was saddened to see the young man so devoured by desire. How many times had he tried to reason with the lad? He even went as far as to explain that sometimes burning blazes could be snuffed out, temporarily at least, and that it sufficed to find some place or other where you could be certain of being alone to “plane the big beam” until your ears buzzed. Louis-Benjamin listened politely to the fellow’s advice, not daring to admit that, in this particular case, a mere plane would be but a droplet of water on a burning stone. He confessed to his master that he was considering eloping with the American girl to marry her in another parish, before a priest who did not know them. Old Michaud explained to him that the plan was destined to fail, that he would only bring disgrace upon himself, and that, in any case, no priest in the province of Quebec would agree to marry a young tenderfoot to a mere slip of a girl without their parents’ consent. When he saw the young boy’s eyes fill with water, Michaud promised to put in a word for him with the priest. He himself had no idea what this initiative might bring, but speaking to the priest never did any harm.

Father Cousineau received Old Michaud just before mass. Michaud tried to find the words to make the man of the cloth understand that young Louis-Benjamin was languishing with love for the young American girl and that the nuptials between the two lovebirds should be celebrated without delay. He himself had taken a wife at nineteen; it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary. He also tried to get the priest to understand that some trees grow more quickly than others, an allusion that was somewhat lost on him. Nevertheless, Michaud added that his main concern was getting the boy back to working at the same pace he had been at before the American girl arrived. Nothing less than a marriage before God—and before Pentecost—would settle the matter. The priest waited patiently for Old Michaud to finish. At the end of the discussion, he invited the cabinetmaker to pray with him for the intervention of the Blessed Virgin. Before leaving, Michaud made an offering to the parish, which, that day, took the form of a sugar pie his wife had baked that very morning, knowing that her husband was off to the presbytery with a request. It was only fifteen minutes until the start of mass. Taking one look at the pie, the priest calculated that by sending Michaud on his way and hurrying just a little, he might have time to eat just the tiniest slice, Lent or no Lent. Old Michaud walked into the church, and when the priest appeared in the sacristy five minutes later, he still had crumbs on his belly.

The sermon was sweeter than usual.

Meanwhile, Old Ma Madeleine was at her wit’s end. On the one hand, the young American was as nice as could be, showed an uncommonly healthy appetite for work, and had won the approval of Louis-Benjamin’s young sisters, with whom she shared a room. She helped the girls get dressed in the morning, braided their hair, kept them clean, and taught them good manners. To say thank-you. To clear the table. To smile. On the other hand, no one knew the first thing about the woman. Where had she come from? Why hadn’t she learned French like everyone else? Had Alphonse’s family taken to English to fit in better in the United States? And what about the girl’s past? Was she going to transmit some terrible disease to her Louis-Benjamin? And in the improbable event she agreed to hand over her oldest son to this mysterious American, would their children grow up to look down on their Canadian father?

One month passed. Then, on the morning of April 2, Easter Tuesday, Father Cousineau knocked on the Lamontagnes’ door, holding a letter mailed in New Hampshire. The torn envelope was proof that the priest had already read and translated its contents. Delicious aromas wafted in from the kitchen. Eggs, Father Cousineau was quite certain, and unless he was mistaken, fresh bread, baked beans, cretons, some kind of pork glistening with fat, and a full and generous teapot were standing by. The American girl was at work. He noted happily that everyone in the Lamontagne family appeared to have gained weight, even though Lent had just ended. Well-rounded cheeks, tight clothes, generous bosoms . . . Old Ma Madeleine’s sons and daughters had spent an anti-Lent to which the American cook’s arrival was surely no stranger. The breakfast table had not yet been cleared when Madeleine the American asked the priest to take a seat. “Please, Father . . .” She disappeared into the kitchen, returning with a plate piled high with pancakes, eggs, and slices of ham. All swimming in a half-inch of maple syrup. The priest, a man used to a leaner diet, dug courageously into the mountain of treats that towered before him. The rich food gave him the courage to announce the news he had come to tell the Lamontagne family. While continuing to eat—because, truth be told, he had never tasted pancakes so fluffy, so light, nor ham so tender—he first asked to speak to the American girl alone. The rest of the family piled into the kitchen. Three of the children spilled out onto the lawn to play in the early rays of the April sun.

From the kitchen, the priest’s low voice could be heard as he spoke hesitantly in the English he had learned at the seminary. It went on for some minutes. Then a prayer went up. Next, after a short silence, three sighs from a woman were heard, followed by a sob. Upon hearing the sobs of the woman he so desired, Louis-Benjamin wanted to burst into the dining room and take her in his arms. Old Ma Madeleine looked daggers at him. “You stay put!” she hissed at her excitable son. After a moment’s silence, the girl swept into the kitchen, her face streaming with tears, sobbing uncontrollably. Intrigued, Old Ma Madeleine and her son went over to the priest, who was busily mopping up his yolk with a slice of toast. He wiped his mouth before he spoke.

He had received a letter from the United States, penned in English by the priest in the girl’s parish of Nashua. Shortly after their adoptive daughter’s departure, Alphonse’s family had suffered much misfortune. First, their youngest son had been struck by a terrible fever that no remedy had managed to cool. They realized too late that the boy had, like so many others, contracted the Spanish flu. The boy of twelve was dead within a week. But the Grim Reaper did not stop there. Two days before the boy breathed his last, his mother felt the beginning of the end stir in her throat. Then it was the father’s turn, and he lasted no more than four days. In all, the flu had plundered four members from a family of only seven, including Madeleine. The Spanish flu had left her an orphan again, depriving her of a father and mother for a second time. Of the three children death had spared, two had already left the family home to get married. The remaining daughter had watched death take the home’s occupants one by one, only to find herself alone. The priest was careful to note in his letter that Clarisse, the unfortunate survivor, was now in the care of the nuns of the state of New Hampshire.

“Are there any of those divine pancakes left?” Father Cousineau inquired. “I think there are indeed!” said Old Ma Madeleine, getting up.

Father Cousineau waited until she was in the kitchen before giving Louis-Benjamin a wink. Between two Americans sobs, the sound of utensils in the kitchen reached them. The priest ruffled the young man’s hair.

“So, my boy. If someone asked you to choose between a trip to France and the American girl, what would you do?”

The boy reddened. He looked down at the wooden table, trying to hold back tears with a weak laugh.

“France is real far!” he said.

“Yes, my boy. Much too far,” the priest replied, taking a sip of tea. “And it’s infested with Germans,” he spat.

“We’re Germans too, Father.”

“I know, but that was before the war, long before. Do you remember Germany?”

“No.”

“Your father neither, nor his father before him. It goes all the way back to the eighteenth century. I don’t think there can be much German left in you.”

“Is the eighteenth century far back?”

“As far away as Germany. And if I were you, I’d keep quiet about it,” he concluded.

Old Ma Madeleine set down a second plate in front of the priest, who didn’t even wait for her to take her hand away before he swiped a piece of pancake, voraciously eyeing a slice of ham glistening in the springtime sun. Outside, the gulls’ cries became more piercing, a few chickadees announced better days, and melted snow ran down the streets, comforting those in mourning. The priest chewed noisily enough for Old Ma Madeleine to consider putting a word in the bishop’s ear the next time he visited. Wasn’t the seminary there to teach good manners? With a nod, the priest signalled for Louis-Benjamin to leave the room so that he could speak in private with Old Ma Madeleine. The youngster leaped up to join Madeleine the American in the kitchen while the priest seized the opportunity to swallow an enormous mouthful of ham.

“There was trouble in Quebec City yesterday,” he announced gravely.

“What sort of trouble?”

“The army is looking for young men to conscript, Mrs. Lamontagne. They sent soldiers from Toronto, English-speaking men who opened fire on an unarmed crowd. Five innocents are dead. It won’t be long until they cross the river and come looking up here. They’ll be after Louis-Benjamin. That good-looking son of yours is eighteen years old.”

Old Ma Madeleine sighed. What could any of this have to do with the drama that had been playing since the priest had arrived?

“The girl no longer has a home to go back to,” the priest said.

“Are you asking me to keep her, Father? She doesn’t understand half of what we tell her.”

“The army doesn’t go around taking fathers from their families, Mrs. Lamontagne.”

There was a silence. Old Ma Madeleine looked outside, where two of her daughters were throwing snowballs at Louis-Benjamin’s brother. It seemed to her that only yesterday her oldest boy had been doing exactly the same thing. She smiled.

“Would you like another cup of tea, Father?”

“I wouldn’t be so impolite as to refuse,” he replied.

Truth be told, the priest would have happily taken some more ham, and perhaps a pancake, but he kept quiet, lest the woman take him for a glutton. Old Ma Madeleine stood up to refill the teapot in the kitchen. Walking through the door, she let out a cry.

“Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne!” she exclaimed.

The priest hoisted his 220 pounds up off the chair to see what was going on in the next room with his own eyes. There was Louis-Benjamin on a kitchen stool, holding the American girl by the waist as she sat straddled in his lap. The latter, as brazen as you please, had undone the second button of her suitor’s shirt, and was removing her hand from the boy’s clothing just as the priest’s head appeared in the doorway. Blushing with shame, the two children didn’t know where to look. The girl tried to free herself from the embrace of her fiancé who, for reasons only young men understand, reasons directly related to the spring breeze blowing through Fraserville that day, desperately wanted her to screen him for just another minute. He clung to her like a lifebuoy. Then suddenly he was infuriated. He grabbed hold of the girl with the firmness of a cowboy wrangling a heifer.

“I don’t wanna go to France, Ma!” he yelled in a tone Old Ma Madeleine had never heard before.

His mother stood there looking helpless, between the two entwined lovebirds and the priest, whose belly could now be heard rumbling. The priest had looked away from the young couple. He was now eyeing up the breakfast leftovers. He noted with no small amount of interest that there was a pancake on the griddle, untouched and still warm.

“You’re not going to throw that pancake out, are you?” he inquired innocently, pointing a finger at the object of his desire.

It was no time until the two youngsters, who had been only one word short of bliss, were united before God. For the fourth time that year, Father Cousineau sped things up a little, putting an earlier date on the banns, smoothing out the rough edges the hands of the authorities wouldn’t help but feel when they came across a young man still practically beardless but in possession of a marriage certificate. On April 3, 1918, before a sparse audience, Louis-Benjamin and Madeleine the American were pronounced man and wife before Father Cousineau, who was as proud as a peacock.

“That’s another one they won’t get.”

In the whole parish, he knew none finer, none sweeter, than the young Lamontagne boys. The very idea that such a handsome young man would have a bomb dropped on him or, worse still, be sent home an invalid or gassed simply because the king didn’t know how to wage a war, was abhorrent to him. Old Ma Madeleine thought it best to wait until her husband had returned home from the logging camp before doing something so momentous for all concerned, to which the priest retorted that the army spotters could step out of the train at any minute or spring up like jack-in-the-boxes on the road. And once they were in Fraserville, there would be nothing for it but to hide her boys like hens hide their chicks. The priest was thinking that, judging by what he had heard from Louis-Benjamin at confession, the young American girl was about to feel a spring wind blow, the likes of which she had never felt, or at least find reward for all her attentions in the kitchen. With the resignation of the birds, Old Ma Madeleine, sitting stiffly in a pew, shed not a tear, tears not being her forte, and wondered instead how she was going to explain everything to her husband when he came back from the logging camp at winter’s end. Piled in beside her in the freezing-cold church, Louis-Benjamin’s little sisters dozed, stared at the Madonna out of the corner of their eyes, or counted the cotton flowers stitched onto Madeleine the American’s white dress, which had been hastily rented the day before from the Thivierges’ general store, meaning that Old Ma Madeleine had been up part of the night adjusting the waist (much too ample for such a tiny slip of a thing) and ironing her girls’ calico dresses. Her face wan and her head filled with sleep, Old Ma Madeleine entrusted the fate of her oldest son to the hands of God and the wedding photos to Lavoie the photographer.

Their wedding photo—the one that Papa Louis is pointing to with an insistent index finger at this very moment, right beside the photo of Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s twin sister who died in Nagasaki—shows the newlyweds in profile, still almost children, Louis-Benjamin with his cowlick standing straight up in the air and smiling blissfully, perhaps because he was wearing a bow tie for the very first time, perhaps because his dearest wish was going to be realized when he walked out of the photographer’s studio on Rue Lafontaine, which the bridal procession had entered headed up by Old Ma Madeleine, followed by her girls, each in their Sunday best, then the main attraction, the undisputed superstars of this strange Easter carnival. The photographer had them sit very close to each other, close enough for the girl to feel on her neck the breath of the strapping Louis-Benjamin doing his level best not to go mad with happiness. They were like two children dressed up as adults to get a laugh out of their parents. The collar on Louis-Benjamin’s shirt was slightly too big for him, his bow tie almost as broad as his smile. As for the girl, she looked like she’d just been told a risqué joke. The blissfully happy expression that was to mark that day still shone clearly in December 1958 in Papa Louis’s living room, in the soft light of the fringed floor lamp that enveloped with its yellow glow the storyteller, his children, a still-decorated Christmas tree, and, at the back of the adjoining parlor, Sirois in his casket. Little Madeleine felt her brother Marc’s hand under her thigh, a restless, mischievous, reassuring presence.

Her mind swimming back and forth between two distinct worlds, Madeleine took her brother Marc’s hand so as not to lose him, so as not to be ejected from this downy nest confected from Christmas trees, gin, little brothers, and stories of brides arriving by train on a winter evening. She wanted to know how Papa Louis had come into the world, because that’s what he’d promised to tell them: how he had come into the world against all odds that Christmas of 1918. She wanted to hear the story just once, then grow up.

“Hold my hand. I don’t want to fall asleep,” she whispered into Marc’s ear.

As if to celebrate the impromptu wedding of Louis-Benjamin and Madeleine the American, Papa Louis lit a cigarette, twirling it several times before going on with the story. The air in the living room filled with an acrid, carcinogenic smell, lending the room a solemn feel, as though Papa Louis had wanted to show they had moved into the adult world and the story was about to get darker. He closed the door to the parlor where Sirois was resting.

“Cigarettes are bad for the dead—and for the living!”

He slapped his broad thighs. Old Ma Madeleine had set up a bedroom for the newlyweds in her home on Rue Fraserville. What is there to say about Louis-Benjamin other than that his boss, Old Michaud, saw all his wishes come true in the first week after the wedding ceremony. The boy had rediscovered his composure and constantly wore a little smile, the one he was known for before the American arrived. In Old Michaud’s workshop, he carved and sanded down one little cradle after the other. His young wife had been caught throwing up into a wooden pail one morning, looking gloomy and preoccupied. In the meantime, Vilmaire Lamontagne, Louis-Benjamin’s father, had returned home from logging over the winter to find his son married to an American. He had arrived back one rainy afternoon to a deserted house. Alone in the kitchen, a young lady was busy preparing rabbits. Vilmaire asked what she was doing in his kitchen. The stranger put down the carcass, rinsed her hands, and tried to sum up in her stilted French the events of the previous weeks. He looked at his daughter-in-law, perplexed and a little worried. The newcomer served him a bowl of hearty stew and a mug of tea. Tired after his long journey, he chewed on his meal as he looked the young woman over. Little Louis-Benjamin married? Where had his wife gotten to? And the girls? All these questions were answered after a long nap when the rest of the family came back from yard work at a cousin’s house. When it was confirmed to him that his son was indeed married, Vilmaire Lamontagne smiled, looked the American up and down, and lifted her up off the ground as though checking her worth in weight.

“You’re my daughter now.”

The summer went by in a state of bliss that was barely interrupted by the pregnancy troubles of the young wife, who substantially increased in volume. On the days her husband received his pay, she would be seen wearily dragging herself back up Rue Lafontaine from the stores. Louis, for his part, had been thrust by his father into the world of woodwork. A similar-looking home was built beside his father’s because they were starting to get under each other’s feet. That September, Father Cousineau started putting in appearances again with the family. They had long since understood that the man had to be fed regularly, if only to express their gratitude to him for having spared Louis-Benjamin a senseless death at Verdun or Vimy. Father Cousineau rather enjoyed being in a dining room teeming with snot-nosed children. The Lamontagne home was a place of comfort, a refuge that allowed him to escape, if only briefly, the cold, impersonal surroundings of the presbytery. On such evenings, he was especially fond of recalling his days at the Rimouski seminary for the Lamontagnes. He had been ordained there, hailing from the nearby Matapédia Valley as he did. He spoke of the camaraderie among the seminarists, without, of course, going into all the details of the special friendships that tended to flourish.

Ten years before being sent to the parish of Saint-François-Xavier in Fraserville, Father Cousineau had belonged to the seminary’s theater troupe, where he had spent his happiest hours. Aside from the pleasure he felt performing scenes from Lives of the Saints or the New Testament, Cousineau really came into his own making sets and costumes. People in Rimouski still remembered the grandiose outfit he had made himself to play King Charles VII in The Maid of Orleans, a pious drama penned by two Brothers of the Holy Cross in 1882 that paid tribute to the victorious king who had managed to rid France of the English plague. For his court costume, young Cousineau had made himself a magnificent doublet from maroon felt, trimmed around the collar and sleeves with fox fur he had begged one of his aunts for. A talented couturier and designer with a keen fashion sense, he hadn’t stopped there: he had also made himself a large black hat with a broad brim upon which he had painstakingly embroidered the white lines that make up the starred pattern of that particular historical headpiece. He drew much of his inspiration from a portrait of the French sovereign that appeared in Lives of the Saints and even went so far as to wear old-fashioned stockings—borrowed from the same aunt who had loaned him the fox fur—under the salmon-pink petticoat breeches that made him vaguely resemble a peony and, the one and only anachronism in his otherwise wholly convincing attire, Charles IX shoes that had also served the year before when the senior students had put on Le Malade imaginaire.

The troupe of seminarists gave the actor who had triumphed as Toinette in Le Malade imaginaire the role of Joan of Arc in The Maid of Orleans. The irony being, Father Cousineau remarked, that the Brothers of the Holy Cross, who had written the play, had included one rather lengthy scene depicting the trial of Joan of Arc, particularly her indictment, in which she was reproached, among many other offences, for wearing men’s clothing. So it was that when the young seminarist played this role dressed up as a woman, a sigh or gasp always went up from the audience, as a train of thought arrived in the station. But in The Maid of Orleans, Father Cousineau had stolen the show from the cross-dressing seminarist thanks to his magnificent costume and the deep voice he had used to reply to Joan of Arc when she was crowned.

“Your Majesty, we absolutely must take Paris. Our victory is unimaginable without Paris.”

“Joan, above all else we must be careful,” Charles VII had replied, under the approving gaze of the audience, Cousineau’s presence so eclipsing poor Levasseur that people almost began to hope he would be burned as quickly as possible.

And so Father Cousineau belonged to those who you could say had missed their vocation in life, even though his Sunday mass attracted four to five hundred souls, rain or shine. To a liturgy as regular as clockwork and in which there was on the face of it no place for creativity or improvisation, the ingenious Father Cousineau always found a way to introduce a dash of theatricality to the proceedings, as though the popes had not already personally seen to it that Catholic mass remained the best show in town. On the feast day of St. John the Baptist, for instance, Father Cousineau made sure that the altar boys were all very young, with curly blond hair. He had arranged it so that the Sisters of the Child Jesus, newly arrived in Fraserville, joined a very active choir that parishioners would turn out to hear at the drop of a hat.

And so it was that on Sunday, November 17, 1918, a very special mass came to be sung at the church of Saint-François-Xavier. Father Cousineau, always with a keen eye for staging and an ear for music, had demanded that each parishioner be at the mass, adding that absentees had better be on their deathbeds. They were going to give glory to God, ask forgiveness for their sins, and praise the Virgin Mary for having brought an end to an interminable war, a senseless, horrifying war, and no grounds would be deemed acceptable for failing to attend the ceremony. Without a word of explanation to the parishioners, Father Cousineau asked the couples he had personally married during the war to fill the first pews, thereby upsetting an established order determined by how much the faithful had contributed to the parish finances. He had also tasked the choirmaster with having the choir sing a Te Deum, a hymn sung on various occasions, notably at the end of a smallpox epidemic or whenever a siege of a city had been lifted, an heir to the throne had been born, spring had arrived after a particularly deadly winter, a shipwrecked crew had been saved, a harvest of oats had been especially bountiful, or an end had come to a war that no one had wanted and that had brought nothing but death, sadness, and pestilence down upon humanity. Father Cousineau’s sermon was clear: “My fellow Canadiens! Go forth and have children to replace those the war has taken from us!”

And he addressed his message to the first rows of the congregation in particular, for the most part sprightly and willing young men married to very young women deprived of all means of contraception.

The Te Deum was magnificent. Papa Louis chanted in Latin to impress his children:

“Te æternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur!” he sang in a tuneful tenor. “What does it mean?” chorused the children, who belonged to a time where people still wanted these mysterious phrases translated.

It means, “All the earth doth worship thee, the father everlasting!” Papa Louis replied, proud to prove that not only was he able to lift a horse clean off the ground but he could translate from the Latin, too.

In a way, the parishioners, and especially those whom Father Cousineau addressed on that first Sunday following the armistice, were singing for their priest a silent hymn full of thanks to a man who, through some sleight of hand, falsification, and manipulation had managed to unite before God and man an unrivaled number of couples, a good many of whom had not yet reached adulthood. With their chubby, smiling faces, not the slightest grey hair among them, their hands still plump, sometimes already expecting, unsuspecting though they were, they wanted nothing more than for the interminable mass to end so they could get on with the task Father Cousineau had set them in the intimacy of their wooden homes. Everyone would remember the impeccable organization behind that armistice mass, the emotion that had washed over the congregation, and Father Cousineau’s touching affection for young people, family, and music. Could there possibly be, east of Quebec City, a parish priest more pleasant, more determined, more kindly? They had their doubts. At any rate, in the hearts of Louis-Benjamin and the American, Father Cousineau was truly a savior, a guardian, an indispensable guide.

But Cousineau still had an idea or two to ensure his masses would live long in the memory of his congregation, masses as unforgettable as opening night at the theater. It goes without saying that he considered Louis-Benjamin and the American something of a creation of his own making. From one Sunday to the next, he could see how the pretty American was thriving, developing more curves, and illuminating with her hopeful face the gazes of the other parishioners. With her bulging belly, rosy cheeks, and glowing complexion, the American exuded maternity and joy. According to the priest’s calculations, she would bring her child into the world after New Year’s Day, which gave him cause to consider realizing a dream he had cherished for years: a live nativity scene at midnight mass. Never had he dared bring up this desire with any of Fraserville’s young couples, fearing they would refuse outright or misinterpret his intentions. But he was so close to the American, and young Louis-Benjamin was, out of all his flock, the closest thing to the son he would never have. And so in September he revealed his plans to them. It wouldn’t be a big deal for Louis-Benjamin and his young wife: between the ox and the little donkey they would come in from the sacristy and walk calmly toward the altar. They would, of course, be appropriately attired, faithfully harkening back to the days of the nativity.

“With real lambs, I promise!” Cousineau had assured them.

He had already spoken to a farmer on Témiscouata Road, who had agreed to supply two of them. They would be led by young shepherds, the same who had played the role of Saint John the Baptist.

“There will be singing, and music, Bach, Balbastre . . . Fraserville will still be talking about this mass in one hundred years’ time!”

In the Lamontagne household, the thought had brought a smile to the little girls’ faces, already imagining their big brother as Joseph and his wife as the Virgin Mary. Old Ma Madeleine immediately expressed her clear disapproval: the young woman would likely not be able to live up to the priest’s ambitions. And it would cause the whole parish to turn its attentions to the pair when all eyes had already been on them for months. At any rate, if the project were to go ahead, it would do so without her consent.

“People are talking. Saying the girl was put in the family way by my Louis-Benjamin before the wedding.”

What Old Ma Madeleine did not know, but what anyone in the parish could have told her, was that that was the most harmless rumor doing the rounds about Madeleine the American. The town gossips had come up with whole new chapters for the tall tales surrounding her origins and the real reasons why she had turned up in Fraserville.

Nobody had officially bought the story of the family decimated by Spanish flu. For scandalmongers, the idea that Madeleine the American had been a victim of circumstance was much too bland. It didn’t fit with the story they had already scripted for her and so they came up with two explanations for her pregnancy. The first had it that the child had been conceived out of wedlock, the very night the American first set foot in the Lamontagne home. The sorry reputation the women of America held in Canadian eyes only added fuel to the fire. An American! Just imagine! The young lad had surely been seduced from the first minute by the red-haired devil. Two reliable witnesses had even seen them kissing on the lips, right under the noses of Old Ma Madeleine, Father Cousineau, and Louis-Benjamin’s little sisters, whose salvation had surely now been compromised by such debauchery. They would have to be watched carefully. But that was far and away the least hurtful of the tall tales circulating along Rue Lafontaine.

There was much worse.

Among the many stories Old Ma Madeleine had never heard about her daughter-in-law was the vile rumor that she had come to Fraserville already carrying the child whose paternity was now being ascribed to Louis-Benjamin. It goes without saying that this version nicely complemented rumors that the American had led a loose life before repenting and winding up in Fraserville. The rest was said to have been a ruse on her part: she seduced Louis-Benjamin, they said, so that he would raise the child whose real father would never be known. At any rate, Old Ma Madeleine was against the idea of a living nativity and did not mince her words. Louis-Benjamin’s father, for his part, was completely indifferent to the whole affair. Only the little Lamontagne girls seemed keen on Father Cousineau’s project. Perhaps they would be allowed to take part themselves?

“The angels are boys,” Old Ma Madeleine snapped, nipping in the bud her daughters’ dreams of the theater.

Louis-Benjamin’s young brother Napoleon wanted to know if they needed a shepherd, making it clear to the priest that any support for his project would come from the youngsters. Louis-Benjamin and the American had laughed long and hard at the priest’s plan and were largely in agreement, provided they had very few lines to deliver. The priest had reassured them immediately: they would have very little to say; the whole thing would be narrated by a nun from the Sisters of the Child Jesus, who would read the story of the nativity from the gospels. This eased the American’s mind in particular. Her hesitant French caused her to blush every time she had to speak in public.

The priest remarked that the young woman was wearing a very simple gold cross on her ample bosom. He had not noticed it when she arrived in the spring. Perhaps it had been hidden by layer upon layer of clothing. But now he could see it shining in the light. The cross was about an inch long and made from real gold. Seeing the priest staring at the piece of jewelry, the girl tried to explain its provenance in French peppered with English. Louis-Benjamin had given it to her for her birthday, on June 24, the feast of St. John the Baptist. She unfastened the gold chain and handed it to the priest, saying, “Could you please bless my cross, Father Cousineau?” The priest fingered the pendant. There was an inscription on the back, its owner’s initials in cursive script: ML. The priest, well used to being asked to bless entire farms, new homes, telephones, and even locomotives, didn’t think twice about blessing the piece of jewelry, especially since he felt that by performing this simple task for the naive little soul, he would surely improve the odds of her taking part in his living nativity. He blessed the small cross and returned it to its owner, pink with gratitude. How much must it have cost? Much more than Louis-Benjamin was earning at Old Michaud’s, that was for sure. But Louis-Benjamin had not let material considerations dampen his ardor for his Madeleine. The cross was brilliant, scintillating proof of it. The priest told the American to be very careful, to never go out in the evening wearing her cross too ostentatiously, and to take good care of it.

“I will, Father Cousineau.”

Much to Old Ma Madeleine’s chagrin, the deal was sealed quickly. They agreed on a dress rehearsal in December, and then the meal was served, to Father Cousineau’s great delight. At last he would have the midnight mass he had always dreamed of.

Father Cousineau thought about his living nativity every day, had costumes made, sat down with the nun to decide on which text to read, did everything in the church to make sure the scene would have every bit the impact he hoped for, even for those who would be sitting at the back or standing. The American was now enormous. She dragged herself with more and more difficulty from one chore to the next. Sometimes she would be caught sleeping on a stool, her head leaning against the kitchen wall, as the soup she had begun to heat up boiled over. On days like those, Old Ma Madeleine would excuse her from all strenuous tasks and order her to remain seated or lying down, to keep away from the stove at any rate, a miserable sentence for a woman used to cooking morning, noon, and night.

With December came Advent, celestial organs, and red cheeks. The Lamontagne family put the building of Louis-Benjamin’s new home on hold. The shell and structure were ready, and the final touches would come in the spring. Even the mountains of Charlevoix, which could be seen gathering snow on the other side of the St. Lawrence, seemed to agree with how things were in Fraserville. In the afternoon, the setting sun gave a rosy hue to the snow and the locals before disappearing. No country was more beautiful.

Then came Christmas.

On December 22, the fourth Sunday of Advent, Father Cousineau again stood up the Sisters of the Child Jesus—the nuns having set up home in the church of Saint-François-Xavier’s sacristy while waiting for their first convent in Fraserville to be built—to dine with the Lamontagne family. The Lamontagnes now considered the man of the cloth one of their own. By this stage of her pregnancy, the American was praying every day to be delivered from the burden she carried, a burden that kicked and wriggled around inside her. She sometimes wondered if the child, so often did it keep her awake at night, was not trying to warn her of some imminent danger. She could feel some sort of battle being waged inside her, she was sure of it. Forced to rest, she was served food by Old Ma Madeleine. It was much less tasty than her own, but had the advantage of being prepared for her. As the priest chewed away on a slice of pork, he politely reminded the married couple he was expecting them on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth for the nativity scene dress rehearsal.

On the morning of December 24, the American was rudely awakened by her child, who was kicking with such frenzy that Louis-Benjamin could see the baby’s foot bulging through his wife’s skin with his own eyes; he could even count five tiny toes. The couple laughed off the incident, Old Ma Madeleine having explained that all her children, particularly the boys, had elbowed and kicked with varying degrees of violence. Painful though it might have been, it was nothing to get worked up over. Around two in the afternoon, as the sun’s angled rays were already starting to turn the snow-covered shores of the St. Lawrence pink, a telegram arrived from Quebec City, warning of most inclement weather for the following day. But the telegraph operator on duty that December 24 had fallen ill and was unable to record the message that might have helped avoid the worst.

The die had been cast by a much higher authority.

In the church, the couple found the parish priest in hysterics, raising his voice in front of the Madonna to berate a visibly dismayed workman. The priest had had a beautiful wooden set made for the nativity scene. Just to the right of the altar stood a miniature stable, complete with a little roof of coarsely planed boards—a nod to the cold, destitution, and poverty the Savior had been born into. A tiny cradle made of branches and filled with straw had been placed beneath this approximately six-foot-high structure. And above the stable there shone a huge star, its wooden frame some five feet across covered by a white sheet. The object fascinated the American for an instant, as she watched the custodian open one of the sides fastened by two tiny metal hinges to hang an oil lamp inside. Perched on a wooden stepladder, the man struck a match and drew it closer to the wick. Once the lamp had been lit, he closed the side of the star, now shining brightly and casting out its yellow light. Madeleine the American had never seen the like of it.

“Beautiful!” she exclaimed, as the priest puffed up with pride.

To read the text of the nativity according to Saint Luke, the priest had chosen a nun whose sweet and gentle voice was sure to charm the faithful, but she had been confined to her bed by an unexplained illness. During the previous night, she had suffered from frightful dreams, at the end of which she had awoken as white as a sheet, her face haggard, in a sweat, and without even taking a bite to eat she had begged her Mother Superior to intercede with the priest on her behalf to relieve her of performing the reading for the nativity scene. She had described her nightmare: a terrifying scene where, standing on the terrace of a stone fortress on the shores of the Tiber River in Rome, she watched, powerless, as a man was executed, his hands bound behind him. In the background stood St. Peter’s Basilica, which she recognized from pictures she had seen. A drum rolled; soldiers took aim with their rifles. Scarlet blood against a white shirt. A body collapsing. Cries ringing out in the sacristy. A fall from a great height.

“The rifles fired real bullets,” sobbed the nun, head in hands.

In a trembling voice, she had explained her helplessness and confusion to her Mother Superior, who found it impossible to reason with her. A little alarmed herself by the shouts and cries of the young nun, and fearing for her protégée, the Mother Superior had advised the priest to call on the services of another reader for his nativity scene, even recommending another nun by the name of Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who had volunteered to do the reading, but of whom nothing was known other than a boundless love and respect for the Holy Scriptures. Nobody in Fraserville in that December of 1918 managed to come up with a satisfactory interpretation of the nun’s nightmare.

The organist was at the dress rehearsal. He held in his hands a few loose sheets of paper, some scores, and the list setting out the order in which the pieces chosen by Father Cousineau were to be played. Louis-Benjamin and Madeleine the American felt as though they had been admitted to an inner circle of actors, and followed the priest’s orders with the diligence of dilettantes. After two hours of practice, false starts, and retakes, they agreed to meet in the sacristy at nine o’clock that evening for the final preparations. The priest was still nervous. Sister Mary of the Eucharist had not been able to attend the rehearsal. A birth had held her back in Cacouna (she was also a midwife). She had, however, promised Father Cousineau she would be at the ceremony and would take her time reading whatever section of the gospel she was asked to. That evening, Old Ma Madeleine went outside and contemplated the overcast sky.

“Looks like snow,” she said in her husband’s direction.

“That’s nice, snow at Christmas.”

Then they decorated the tree, the little girls dressed in their Sunday best, big Napoleon in a suit, and they waited for the birth of Christ. Louis-Benjamin and Madeleine the American were already in the sacristy. Sister Mary of the Eucharist still had not arrived. The priest was pacing around in circles, praying that a mishap hadn’t befallen her on the way to Fraserville. The actors got into their costumes. For Joseph they had chosen a loose-fitting beige shirt and moleskin pants. By way of props, a set square and a small saw hung from a braided cord at his waist to remind everyone he was a carpenter. Louis-Benjamin felt very much in character. Sitting in a corner, two blond angels, brothers from the same family, helped each other adjust their great white wings as they hung from a harness. Both were to play the Archangel Gabriel. The priest had at first wondered whether the audience would be confused if he had the same character played by two different actors, but neither of the two was prepared to give up a speaking part to his brother. The role was therefore divided into two equal parts. To avoid the whole thing dragging on for hours, the performance would follow the regular midnight mass his parishioners had grown used to.

Sister Mary of the Eucharist arrived just as mass was about to begin, which meant that the priest didn’t have a chance to introduce her to the other actors. Madeleine the American spent the whole mass wondering why Father Cousineau, a man who placed such stock on appearances, had asked such a frightening-looking woman to take part in a nativity scene. From the front, the sight of Sister Mary of the Eucharist could elicit the odd snigger. But from the side her silhouette recalled that of a crow or some other large-beaked bird. Her nose, upon which sat a small pair of round glasses, seemed to go on forever. And it would have been impossible, even if one were to mime, to describe her face without first mentioning that nose, just like it would be impossible to speak of Paris without mentioning the Eiffel Tower. Young or old? It was impossible in the penumbra of midnight mass to put an age on the bleak, tortured, and downright alarming face. In contrast to her black and white Sister of the Child Jesus habit, the pale skin of her face shone in the church like a moon in June; the image would have been reassuring and calming in this particular context, had the nun been careful not to smile: instead, the determined contraction of her facial muscles made her look as though she had swallowed a boomerang in full flight. The American recalled the legends of New England, terrible tales of pregnant women who, startled by some hideous monster or other who had appeared out of nowhere, had given birth to appalling, deformed creatures. While Sister Mary of the Eucharist sang about shepherds watching their flocks by night, the American felt a stirring in her breast, a dull, deep trembling that in other circumstances would have scared the wits out of her. Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s voice, nasal and sharp as a bayonet, broke away from the rest of the choir.

But the young woman had no more time to continue with her questions. Her belly filled with pain, she stood with the others to hear O Holy Night being bellowed by a townsman whom a fellow parishioner, seeking to flatter, had foolishly complimented one day on his voice. At “Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!” the American felt another stirring inside her, as though the words had been addressed to her personally. While the church was only three-quarters full, it was not for a lack of devotion from the parishioners, nor because Father Cousineau had failed to promote his show. Rather, around ten o’clock that evening, heavy snow had begun to fall on Fraserville. After a quarter of an hour it lay already an inch or two deep in front of the church and showed no signs of letting up.

For fear of seeing the first gust of wind transform this touching scene into a hellish storm, many parishioners had not made the trip to midnight mass, even if that meant being refused communion for a week or having to go to confession. The snow was now falling in dense flurries. And yet it was only when the wind began to whistle over the church roof that the parishioners really began to worry. No doubt about it: Father Cousineau would have excommunicated on the spot the first person to dare suggest they leave the church earlier than planned. The nativity would go on!

As the Latin mass ended quietly with Christmas wishes and hopes for greater fraternity that bore more than a passing resemblance to those of the previous year, the actors gathered in the sacristy to make their entrance. The American felt a little light-headed. Only Sister Mary of the Eucharist had stayed with the choir, looking over the pages of the New Testament she was preparing to read. But fear was beginning to get the better of the faithful. As the wind whistled more and more insistently, they feared they would no longer be able to make it home. A handful of families excused themselves politely and exited via the main aisle under the wrathful stare of Sister Mary of the Eucharist, her pale, haunting ugliness glinting in the low light.

The runaways had waited for Father Cousineau to disappear into the sacristy, but were forced to turn back once they realized, upon opening the church doors, that a terrible blizzard was beating down on Fraserville. You couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead, the wind flinging to the ground any brave souls who might have preferred the prospect of a nice warm meal in their cozy homes to a nativity scene in a poorly heated church while the wind howled ominously outside. A few families who lived in neighboring homes took their chances with the snowstorm. The rest returned to their seats, informing those who had stayed behind of what they had seen. The congregation was seized by panic. Were they all going to have to spend the night in the church? A worried murmur went up from the two hundred or so people who had resisted the temptation to slip out.

Sister Mary of the Eucharist cleared her throat to attract everyone’s attention. She had just heard Father Cousineau signal that they were ready to begin. Someone turned down the lights. Between two gusts of wind, the nun’s nasal voice rang out in the church.

“There was in the days of Herod, the King of Judaea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth.

“And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

“And they had no child . . .”

No one in Fraserville could claim they had ever heard Sister Mary of the Eucharist read out loud. People vaguely knew the nun, a ghostly, furtive figure sometimes glimpsed striding down Rue Lafontaine. Behind closed doors, Sister Mary of the Eucharist was referred to, depending on people’s imaginations, as The Crow, The Raven, The Wicked Fairy, or, quite simply, Sister Scary. It would never have crossed anyone’s mind to cast her in a living nativity. Far from evoking the grace of an angel in flight, her face recalled more the fall of the walls of Jericho than it did the Annunciation. As for her voice—a husky growl escaping from an ashen, wrinkled throat—it seemed to come straight from the deep, smoking crater of a devastated land. A shiver ran down the spines of the faithful.

The characters appeared stage left as their names were called. Father Cousineau had given himself the role of Zacharias, while Elizabeth was played by a young woman by the name of Marie Plourde, the notary’s daughter. The nun rolled her r’s terribly, stressing the final syllable of each phrase as though it were a judgment of apocalyptic proportions. Worst of all, she was afflicted by a tragic lisp. It was, as someone was to say forty years later when describing her sepulchral voice, “as though a Brussels sprout had started to talk.” In the darkness, the two little blond boys had silently ascended the pulpit, the tiny balcony attached to a large column in line with the first pews, its staircase wound around the column on the left. The thought of leaving the church in the terrible storm was momentarily pushed to the back of the congregation’s mind. The nun droned on:

“And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.

“And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.”

The nun delivered the last sentence in the same tone storytellers adopt to say, “and the wolf gobbled her up!” A murmur ran through the congregation while the organist, high up in his jube, attacked the opening notes of the accompanying music whose chords, far from reassuring or calming them, only made everyone more nervous. In the pulpit, the two angels began to speak at the same time, not giving a thought to the priest’s instructions.

“Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elizabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”

Father Cousineau, playing Zacharias, responded to the Archangel Gabriel’s long tirade in his deep voice: “Whereby shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.”

The congregation pondered, and for good reason, a certain number of questions, namely: Why does the Archangel Gabriel have two heads? And why four wings? Why is one angel being played by two boys?

The priest, when he heard the boys parroting the gospel as one, looked up and could not prevent an expression of surprise from spreading across his face, an expression so in tune with the scene that someone was heard to mutter, “You can tell he’s no stranger to acting, eh?” But the poor director’s troubles had not ended there. Aside from the fact that they were both speaking at the same time, the little archangel boys did not have the clearest diction, so that “thy prayer is heard” came out as “thy bear is bared” and instead of “thou shalt be dumb” the congregation heard, “thou shalt be a bum,” but these mispronunciations were quickly forgiven. The Elizabeth-Zacharias procession fell silent, giving way to the Annunciation. In the half-light stage right, Father Cousineau prayed to all the saints that the boys would begin taking turns. But his prayer was not heard over the howling wind. When Louis-Benjamin’s brother Napoleon made his entrance, leading two lambs on a leash, cries of delight rang out. The young man smiled beatifically, conscious of the effect the charming animals were having on a Catholic audience whose imaginations were largely composed of bucolic scenes, and who, more than anyone, were inclined to accept the animals as a happy omen. To general hilarity, the lambs bleated as if to announce their entrance. People turned to look at each other:

“Ah! Dear old Father Cousineau! Is there anything he wouldn’t do?”

“Are those the Lévesque lambs there?”

“All that’s missing is an ox and a donkey!”

The latter did put in an appearance, but only in song. The choir of nuns struck up a crystal-clear rendition of Silent Night. The spectacle was a feast for every sense. Somewhere myrrh was burning. Thick, perfumed smoke rose slowly in the air, wafting through the church.

Just as she was about to make her entrance onstage, the American was struck by such a violent cramp in the lower abdomen that she fell to her knees before the Archangel Gabriel, stretching out a trembling arm toward him. “My word, the girl’s got talent!” Father Cousineau thought to himself. He hadn’t seen such a powerful performance since his own Charles VII in The Maid of Orleans. Then the two-headed archangel cried:

“Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee.”

The howl of pain that went up from the American was drowned out by the organ as it launched into Balbastre’s Joseph est bien marié, the music temporarily calming the electric atmosphere in the church. The archangel went on, “Thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and . . .” The nun continued to rhyme off the gospel like a bailiff delivering a death sentence. The pain had left the American groggy and stunned. Louis-Benjamin helped her to her feet. Among the congregation, people said she was a born actress for being able to swoon so convincingly before an angel that wasn’t even real. After a fashion, they finally got to the birth of Jesus.

“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.”

At these words, the American girl let out a scream that is still echoing around the church of Saint-François-Xavier to this very day. Standing in front of the make-believe stable, she gripped Louis-Benjamin’s shoulders with both hands, pulling his fake beard off in the process.

“My God! Oh my Gooooood!” the pretend Virgin Mary roared, as though pierced by spears.

Before the horrified gaze of the congregation, the poor woman fell onto the straw, rolled herself up into a ball and continued to scream.

“Her water’s broken!” shouted Elizabeth, who had edged closer, now certain that the cries were not part of the production.

A frightened snort made its way around the church. Her water? Already? A particularly nasty gossip seized the moment to whisper to her sister-in-law in a slanderous tone, “I thought she was supposed to have it after New Year’s Day.” On the altar, the nun had stopped reading and made her way over to the American. Louis-Benjamin, down on his knees beside his wife, was imploring her to calm down. Father Cousineau’s heart had skipped a beat when he heard the frightful cry.

“Somebody fetch a doctor!” a voice rang out.

Two strapping lads opened the main doors, engulfing the inside of the church in an ice-cold blizzard. From outside could be heard the sound of part of a building being torn off by the storm and now making a terrible din as it clattered against the stone. A maple bough as big as a man, only just ripped from its trunk, flew into the church to the shouts of women who huddled together, prepared to face the apocalypse. On her bed of straw, Madeleine was now howling desperately, her body shuddering from the powerful contractions. Sister Mary of the Eucharist had placed her head in her lap and whispered a hoarse prayer “. . . blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb . . .” to the irritation of Father Cousineau, who could see his nativity was going to end in drama. The bulk of the congregation had gathered at the door to throw the maple bough back outside. Others strained to close the doors that the wind had slammed against the outside wall; it took no fewer than four men to a door. By the time the doors had been shut, the two hundred or so who had stayed behind for the nativity scene were bitterly regretting their decision. Fetching Doctor Lepage, who lived at the lower end of town, was out of the question. Neither man nor beast would be able to convince him to make his way up the hill to the church. Rather than feeling sorry for the American, the congregation was busy planning its escape from this house of pain. Whether prudish, irritated, or disgusted, they’d had enough drama for one night. Some one hundred people, most of them bright young things with no fear of God or high winds, faced with the choice of watching the American bring a child into the world or freezing to death in a blizzard, had chosen to brave the elements without a second’s hesitation. The church doors were opened one last time to let the runaways escape. Most of them lived nearby and would probably manage to make it home. For the others, those who lived more than five hundred yards away, escape was unthinkable.

“We must pray!” proclaimed Old Ma Madeleine, drawing a set of white rosary beads from her pocket.

“Yes! A rosary! A rosary for the American!” another woman chimed in. Those who had left their pews sat back down, casting a discreet eye over the terrible scene unfolding before the altar. Now writhing in pain on the straw, Louis-Benjamin’s young wife was panting like a thirsty dog, giving out the occasional shriek in between the odd heartrending “Nooo!” and “Help me!” Her husband was sobbing in the arms of the priest, who was trying to console him. The two little angels, still high up on the pulpit, were crouched beneath the balustrade so as not to have to witness the scene. Only the tips of their wings could be seen trembling in the half-light. Two nuns came running from the sacristy with towels and assorted metal instruments. The American had to be brought to the sacristy right away, they gasped. But the American was not for moving.

“I can’t move! Help me! Oh Lord, help me!” she shrieked. Her cries echoed three or four times around the almost-empty church.

Sister Mary of the Eucharist took the situation in hand.

“We must save the child!” she said in a voice that instantly made everyone fear the worst.

She knelt before the American, and with the dumbfounded congregation, the priest, and Louis-Benjamin looking on, lowered the American’s stockings and underwear to spread her legs.

“Don’t be afraid, Madeleine. This child is going to be born. I know a thing or two about bringing children into this world. Pray to the Lord and breathe as I tell you. And when I tell you to push—push!” she told her in her back-from-the-grave voice.

“You have to push, Madeleine!” someone shouted from the third row, even though the American had understood well enough that the nun was also a midwife and that she was going to give birth on this pile of straw. Powerful contractions rocked her body. Joseph had regained his courage and rested his wife’s head on his broad chest. On a nun’s orders, the congregation broke into a rosary.

“The rosary!” the nun cried, brandishing her beads.

And the prayers went up, forming a musical backdrop that was occasionally interrupted by a shriek from the woman in labor. Sister Mary of the Eucharist felt the mother’s belly, as though searching for something. She looked contrite and disapproving. A full hour of intense labor went by, while the prayers continued in the pews. The American appeared exhausted. Half opening a frightened eye, she flattened her hands in the straw and moaned miserably.

“The baby’s facing the wrong way. When was the last time he moved?” she asked the American, who was suffering too much to reply. “This child should have been turned three days ago!” the nun shouted, lubricating her hand with a greasy substance a fellow nun held out to her. “Madeleine, I’m going to have to put my hand inside you to turn the child. It’s not facing the right way at all.”

Sister Mary of the Eucharist slowly put her hand up into the American’s dilated vagina. A flood of amniotic fluid cascaded out onto the straw. A man sitting in the third row fainted. Madeleine screamed blue murder. “Push,” the nun shouted. She removed her hand from deep inside Madeleine, who, her mouth wide open, was now begging to be put out of her misery. From time to time, she would crane her neck to glance down at the nun who was helping her bring her child into the world, only to let out a cry of terror at the sight of her hideous face.

“Try to calm her down!” the nun hissed at the father.

Louis-Benjamin sang into his wife’s ear the only English song he knew: Will you love me all the time? The song did seem to soothe her a little, and there was almost the hint of a smile on her lips. Sister Mary of the Eucharist seemed quite irritated.

“Madeleine, you have to push. Push as hard as you can!”

The congregation held its breath; the little angels sobbed in the pulpit; the women who had given birth themselves felt Madeleine the American’s pain as their own. The men did their best not to rest their eyes on the terrible scene. Madeleine wasn’t making it easy for them: she wouldn’t stop screaming. Suddenly a terrible spasm went through her body and her piercing yell gave way to a thin, reedy sound, a pianissimo con forza howl that shattered Louis-Benjamin’s eardrums. Sister Mary of the Eucharist shook her head. A small, grey arm could now be seen between the American’s legs. The child had chosen this position to be born into the world, but that seemed the least of Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s worries.

“The child has been dead for a while. Now we must try to save the mother.”

Sister Mary of the Eucharist leaped up and ran to the sacristy, where she lived with the other nuns. She reemerged after a minute armed with a peculiar instrument. It looked like a pair of metal pliers, glistening like a jewel in the half-light. The nun ran a determined hand along the little dead arm and pushed her own arm in until she could feel the whole child in its mother’s womb. The maneuver caused a terrible ripping and tearing, and the American began to bleed profusely. The smell of excrement mixed with the scent of the Christmas candles. The nun’s bony fingers found the child’s neck and gripped it firmly. Then, very carefully, with her right hand she picked up the instrument she had brought from the sacristy.

“What is that?” Louis-Benjamin gasped.

“Forceps. We use them to turn and extract babies when they are being born. Madeleine, I’m going to use this instrument to get your baby out. Don’t be afraid. I use them all the time. It’s absolutely normal. Even kings and princesses are delivered using forceps.”

The nun inserted the forceps into Madeleine’s body, found the dead child’s head, and caught hold of it. Then she waited for the next contraction to pull the baby from its mother’s belly.

“Push, Madeleine! Push!”

Resistance was spongy and strong. The baby’s head, spattered with mucus and blood, appeared, lodged between the forceps’ metallic arms. In front of the traumatized onlookers, the nun managed, with a painful grunt, to extract the dead child from the body of its mother who, after arching violently, had fallen onto her back, exhausted from the pain. Madeleine’s wounds continued to bleed horribly, despite the nun’s efforts to contain the hemorrhage. Someone in the congregation began to vomit noisily. The nun looked up at the ceiling, wondering which saint to turn to next. She motioned for Father Cousineau to come forward. She spoke softly into his ear. The priest nodded twice, then knelt down beside the American to give her the last rites. Every gaze followed the same trajectory, tracing a triangle from the dead child, then to Madeleine, before falling inevitably back to Sister Mary of the Eucharist’s sad, frightful face. As soon as it was extracted from its mother’s body, the child was laid on the straw. All eyes were now on the tiny, stiff, greyish-white form, its eyes closed.

“It was a girl,” someone said.

Hands covered in mucus and blood, the nun had her eyes locked on the mother’s open belly, still shaken by contractions. The audience was stunned. Moments before the birth, some had made a break for the jube, clambering up the stairs four at a time to find refuge and escape the gaze of the American and the priest, trying to forget they had ever been witness to the scene. Up above, Louis-Benjamin’s little sisters sobbed in each other’s arms. Two women tried to console them.

“Your brother will have other children. Hush now. Let us pray to the Lord.”

A man stood with his hands over his ears, trying to block out the prayers and the shouting. Of all those the storm had trapped inside the church of Saint-François-Xavier that Christmas night, very few escaped without lasting psychological damage. The parishioners huddled together in the jube tried to strike up a conversation that would have distanced them, in mind if not in body, from this cursed place. But even from up there, any escape from the terrible racket that followed was impossible. After five minutes when nothing but crying, sobbing, and the voices of the obstinate few who persisted with the rosary could be heard, a cry of unprecedented force rang out in the church. The American’s body had started to convulse once again, as the nun held her legs apart. The nun appeared to be no longer aware of anything else around her.

“Jesusmaryandjoseph!” she gasped.

A tiny foot could be seen kicking the American’s still-enormous belly. This one was very much alive, and apparently demanding their attention.

“Madeleine! Madeleine! You need to push! Push harder!”

The American had no strength left. She tried to contract her muscles one last time. The nun plunged her arm back inside her to grab hold of the living child and waited again, patiently, for the last contraction to come. By this point, all life seemed to have abandoned the mother’s body. She was now breathing only feebly to the sound of the prayers mumbled by Father Cousineau. And yet, something in her was still alive: the second child whose existence she had only just learned of.

“Madeleine, push . . .” murmured Louis-Benjamin.

Then Madeleine pushed, slowly and painfully, helped by Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who had a firm grip on the second child’s head. A cry tore through the church. “She’s having another! And this one’s alive!” Every head, which out of respect for the stillborn child had been bowed, suddenly rose again. A drumming of feet could be heard from those who had sought refuge from the horror in the jube and were now racing back down the stairs to see the miracle for themselves. Kneeling on the blood-soaked straw, Sister Mary of the Eucharist, herself dumbfounded at the turn of events, struggled to pull the second child out of the American. From the front rows, people had already seen the child’s huge head emerge, then its shoulders and pelvis, and last of all its tiny feet. Pale pink in color, the baby was already moving its arms, as though to reassure everyone of its health. Sister Mary of the Eucharist patted it on the back a few times, holding it by the feet. A subdued, somber, sinister silence fell over the congregation. The little one’s birth had been a total surprise, but there were already very precise though modest hopes for him: that he let out a cry. They waited another five seconds, then Papa Louis’s voice was heard for the first time, strong, clear, and resonant, immediately followed by one “Thanks be to God” after another, ending the very short period of mourning in memory of his twin sister.

In Louis-Benjamin’s lap, the American showed no signs of life. Her face, glistening in pallor, was even whiter than the statue of the Madonna. An inverse Pietà, the couple was no longer of interest to anyone. Madeleine had passed away in the arms of Louis-Benjamin, who had tenderly closed her eyes. Attention now turned to the child, to the huge baby wailing at the top of its lungs, turning its head right and left like an old man in the throes of a nightmare. “It’s a boy!” Old Ma Madeleine cried from the pew where she was sitting, rosary beads still in hand. Beneath the wooden shelter, Sister Mary of the Eucharist passed the child to his father, whose arms trembled as he reached out. The American’s head fell back against the floor with a dull thud. The nun leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. Before moving away, discreetly, quickly, furtively, she removed the gold chain and little cross that Louis-Benjamin had given her for her birthday on the feast of St. John the Baptist. The piece of jewelry disappeared into the folds of her voluminous habit.

Two or three hours after the child was born, the wind ceased battering Fraserville. Everyone took the opportunity to go home. Madeleine the American and her stillborn child could not be buried right away, so their caskets were stored for the winter at the charnel house. It was only in spring, once the ground had thawed, that mother and baby were buried. Old Ma Madeleine searched high and low for the little cross the deceased had been given as a gift by her husband. But she could not find it anywhere. She asked all those present at the scene, even Sister Mary of the Eucharist, who claimed never to have set eyes on it.

“She should be buried with her little cross,” Old Ma Madeleine sighed in vain.

The Fraserville undertaker engraved Madeleine Lamontagne (The American) on her tombstone, which was solidly planted in the ground that spring at a funeral ceremony Louis-Benjamin did not attend, since on March 1, 1919, one year to the day after Madeleine the American first arrived in Fraserville, his body was found in the Rivière du Loup, at the foot of the waterfall where he had thrown himself to his death, inconsolable, desperate. He was given the burial reserved for those who chose death over life, interred in a small, separate cemetery, far from the mortal remains of Madeleine the American, who, having died of natural causes, had been given a Christian burial. The child was baptized Joseph-Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne on the very day of his birth, but his grandmother, Old Ma Madeleine, always called him Louis, and raised him alongside her remaining five children.

Of the American there remained only a handful of objects: items of clothing, a prayer book, wedding photos, and The New England Cookbook, which the young woman had had in her bags the day she arrived in Fraserville and which Old Ma Madeleine did not have the heart to throw out, and which she could not make out a word of in any case. She packed all the items away in boxes and had her son Napoleon drop them off at the Sisters of the Child Jesus to be given to those in need.

Louis was an unusually robust boy. At birth, he already weighed twelve pounds, a very respectable weight for a boy born in 1918, and a twin to boot. By the time Fraserville had calmed down, by the time Old Ma Madeleine had mourned her daughter-in-law, and then her son, it was spring of 1919, the first year of peacetime after a long war. Father Cousineau had lost the pounds he had put on during the American’s brief stay in Fraserville. Old Ma Madeleine did not really know what she should tell the child. The people of Fraserville would no doubt take care of that for her soon enough. There was always a doubt at the back of her mind; she was suspicious of a boy who was too big and would eat enough for two, already managing to sit up by himself barely a few weeks after he was born. Nonetheless, Old Ma Madeleine had other things to be worried about. One day in June, after the American’s funeral, she insisted on meeting Father Cousineau alone at the presbytery with the child. She wanted, she said, to ask his opinion on a matter concerning the baby. Nothing serious, just a nagging doubt, a question sparked by that sixth sense somewhere between the heart and the mind that serves neither to think nor to love, but that allows a woman to feel rightfully worried.

The priest was only too happy to meet her.

And so Old Ma Madeleine arrived at the presbytery the following day with the child she had difficulty carrying and who was already demanding to be fed even though he had eaten barely twenty minutes earlier. Strangely, the baby stopped bawling as soon as the priest took him in his arms.

“How may I be of assistance, Madeleine?”

By way of reply, Old Ma Madeleine took the child, set him down on the table, and began undressing him. Once he was wearing nothing more than a cotton diaper and babbling ga-ga-gaa, the priest repeated his question.

“The child seems perfectly normal to me,” he added. “A little hefty for such a young thing, but when you think of so many other children being born all sickly and skinny, it’s nice to see one so robust! He’ll be a strong man, your Louis!”

The priest gently pinched the child’s plump thighs between his thumb and index finger as Louis smiled, revealing what looked like a tooth on its way. Old Ma Madeleine sighed and undressed the child completely to show him to Father Cousineau as God intended. She pointed between little Louis’s legs. Father Cousineau squinted, then put on his spectacles, because he was rather far-sighted. His jaw dropped. There was a moment of silence, then he looked Old Ma Madeleine in the eye and muttered: “May God preserve it for him!”

In the living room on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, Papa Louis’s impression of Father Cousineau had the children rolling about laughing.

“And then in 1919, Fraserville became Rivière-du-Loup,” he went on. “Officially, I’m as old as our town! You children should know that!” he said, finishing his fourth gin of the evening.

In the meantime, Madeleine and Marc had undressed their brother Luc. He was already sound asleep. He barely made a sound when his sister Madeleine slipped his undershirt off. Then they pulled their pants down and inspected each other. Madeleine buried her face in her hands in shame.

“Papa Louis! I don’t have one!” Marc lamented.

“Not all three of you have one,” Papa Louis responded. “Only your sister and your little brother.”

They all gathered around Luc first, still asleep on the sofa. An inch above his ankle, he had a small birthmark about the size of a dime and shaped somewhat like a bass clef.

“What is it?” he asked, waking at last.

“A bass clef,” replied Papa Louis. “It’s for writing music on staves.”

The children looked at it, wide eyed. In their excitement they hadn’t heard their mother Irene return home from the convent. This was how she found them, bedtime long since passed, Papa Louis tipsy, Luc stark naked, Madeleine and Marc with their pants down. Too late, they turned to see her, standing fuming at the living-room door. If it is possible to describe such an expression in words, it could be said Irene had the end of the world written all over her face. In a flash, she grabbed her pantsless son by the scruff of the neck and marched him upstairs to his bedroom. Without a word—just a look—she picked up Luc and ordered Madeleine up the stairs, where she closed the door to her daughter’s bedroom and told her in no uncertain terms to go to sleep.

“We’ll talk about all this tomorrow.”

In a dream, half awake, little Madeleine could hear her mother’s shouts rising from the living room. The glass thrown against the wall shattering into pieces. A “Christ Almighty!” from Papa Louis. The dull thud of a woman’s body flung against a wooden floor. Once. Twice. Then silence. The sound of water running. In the parlor, Sirois’s body went on decaying to general indifference.

The dead mind their own business.

A Black Eye is Watching You

YEARS BEFORE A journalist dubbed her the “Queen of Breakfast” at the opening of one of her restaurants in a Toronto suburb, Madeleine had been a little girl almost like any other. Lots of people could have told you that, people like Siegfried Zucker, a kind of door-to-door salesman who once a month traveled the length and breadth of the Lower St. Lawrence in a truck chock-full of foodstuffs that he hawked at knock-down prices that could be knocked down even further if you were ready to bargain. Zucker, an Austrian who came to Canada after the war, had decided to make the Lamontagne home the last stop of the day. He was always welcomed by Irene Caron, a hardened negotiator, and her little girl, Madeleine. It was probably the Austrian who first picked up on Madeleine’s nose for business. When she was eight, Zucker once offered Madeleine a barley sugar lollipop in the shape of a maple leaf. They were standing outside on the steps while her mother carried what she’d bought into the kitchen.

“Can I have one for my brother Marc?”

“Why of course!” Zucker replied, handing over a second candy.

When Zucker came to deliver Irene Caron’s order the following month, there was no sign of little Madeleine. Instead, he found her brother Marc playing on the porch with a cat. The boy thanked him for the previous month’s lollipop.

“At that price, you’re practically giving them away!” he laughed to Zucker, who realized that Madeleine had sold the candy to her brother.

Far from being shocked, Zucker developed an instant fondness for Madeleine. In some ways, she became his favorite customer. He would often haggle with her over imaginary wares, testing the child’s perspicacity, and she never let him down. Madeleine in turn grew fond of the man she came to associate with abundance, profit, and barley sugar.

Aside from Zucker, no one in the parish of Saint-François-Xavier could ever have imagined that the undertaker’s daughter would one day turn the restaurant world on its head, revolutionizing how North Americans defined breakfast. Madeleine seemed predisposed to nothing but the ordinary, tedious, and laborious life of any French-Canadian woman. But from the moment she entered the convent school, the nuns discovered she had a gift for mental arithmetic. As it happened, her brothers had been the first to realize her talent the day all three of them had been watching The Horse do a bench press and Marc had wondered out loud how much the barbell weighed.

“How much do you think, Madeleine?”

In a split second, Madeleine had, to her brother’s astonishment, added and multiplied the round weights plus the bar.

“Two hundred and thirty-five pounds.”

Then, at the age of eight, she had, without really meaning to and in the offhand way that only little girls can manage, surprised an entire grieving family with her math skills. It was at the wake of the widow, April. Madeleine, holding a tray of cookies, was following her mother about while she poured coffee into the cups of the family come to keep vigil over the wrinkled corpse of the old woman whose niece had found her sitting dead in her rocking chair. The niece, a woman in her thirties whom grief had made voluble to a fault, chattered incessantly while the other relatives, absorbed by their rosary, seemed oblivious to her.

“It’s strange just to go like that. She wasn’t even ill. Of course, considering her age . . . How old was Aunt Jeanne anyway? Let’s see, she was three years younger than her husband and he was born in 1891, so that would make her, uh . . .”

“Sixty-four,” Madeleine piped up, as she proffered the tray of cookies, instantly reducing the woman to silence, much to the relief of the rest of the family.

Besides this gift for numbers and the effect the stories of Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne—a man she considered a demigod—had on her, Madeleine had only one other exceptional character trait: she had a jealous streak, a poison she had begun imbibing without reserve the day the letter from Potsdam, New York, arrived. In theory, the letter from Potsdam should never have fallen into Madeleine’s hands, but fate had decided otherwise. On that particular day in September 1958, Irene had kept her daughter home so that she could catch chicken pox from her little brother Marc, who had caught it at the boys’ school.

“Better to have it at her age than once she’s an adult. It’ll be over and done with.”

Irene tucked the still-sleeping Madeleine into the bed of her crying brother, whose hands Papa Louis had tied behind his back to keep him from scratching himself raw. There he was, trussed up like a turkey and itching all over, when his sister arrived in his bed. Irene had to go out for a few minutes and Louis had left to pick up a corpse from a house on Rue Saint-Pierre. Which meant that the children were all by themselves when the letter dropped into the letterbox on Rue Saint-François-Xavier. Madeleine heard the metal click and the postman’s footsteps on the wooden porch. Curious, she went downstairs, ignoring Marc’s pleas.

“Scratch me or untie me, will you!”

The envelope with the red and blue border caught her attention. It bore an American stamp with an old man on it. And the address, which wasn’t easy to read for a youngster of eight:

Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne

Rivière-du-Loup

Province of Quebec, Canada

The sender, a lady by the name of Floria Ironstone, had written the return address on the back of the envelope. Potsdam, New York. Madeleine read the name one syllable at a time, stumbling when she got to the impossible-to-pronounce Ironstone. She took an instant dislike to the name Floria. This person—she could feel it—wanted to steal her Horse away from her. She immediately sensed the letter was a threat to her happiness and decided then and there that it would never reach its intended recipient. Seeing her mother at the end of the road, she scampered up the stairs, holding her booty at arm’s length. She barely had time to hide the letter behind a baseboard and race back to her brother’s room (where poor Marc was being driven mad by the itching) before Irene opened the door downstairs. Apart from this letter from America that she had intercepted in the nick of time, Madeleine used to hide all kinds of valued finds behind that board, little treasures she had “discovered” here and there, and that glinted and gleamed. Sometimes at night she would pry back the board, the door to her secret safe, to admire her fortune by the light of a polished-glass lamp. And this is what she would see there, shining in the magpie’s dusty nest:

—a wedding band stripped from a dead man’s hand at a boisterous wake where the grieving relatives had decided, just before closing the casket for the last time, to settle a few old scores over fisticuffs on Louis Lamontagne’s lawn. While Papa Louis separated the men, Madeleine had snuck up to the casket and pocketed the shiny ring that had been calling out to her with every ray it had for the past two days;

—a silver spoon given to her brother Luc and every other child in the Commonwealth who had been born on June 2, 1953, to commemorate the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II;

—and a cheap flower-shaped earring her brother Marc had found in the mud in the spring of 1957.

Irene was upstairs now.

Madeleine pushed the board back in place.

“Put that on your brother’s spots, Madeleine. It’s calamine lotion, it’ll help.”

Madeleine made a face. Marc begged his mother to untie him.

“It itches so bad!”

“It’s perfectly normal. It’ll pass.”

Ten days later, it was Madeleine’s turn to be smeared in pink calamine lotion, her wrists tied tight behind her back.

“It’s for your own good.”

Now, you may well wonder why Madeleine refused to open Floria Ironstone’s letter. The explanation is quite simple. She was convinced that its contents, for as long as they remained imprisoned inside the envelope, wouldn’t be able to disrupt things. To the little girl’s mind, a letter is only a letter once it has been opened. By opening the envelope, she risked setting free a virus that she knew would prove fatal to The Horse.

Far from Rivière-du-Loup, in St. Lawrence County, New York, Floria Ironstone waited and waited to hear back from The Horse, until she finally came to the realization that he would not be writing. The letter had been delivered to the wrong stallion. At least she’d tried.

“He was French Canadian, your daddy,” she would later tell her daughter.

She’d christened her Penelope, the perfect name for a little girl who would wait her whole life to hear from her father. Floria had been a singer before becoming an acrobat, but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize that her future was on the trapeze. Penelope must have heard the story a dozen times, “He was French Canadian, your daddy . . .” and so would begin the story of the time her mom met her dad in 1939, a frightfully odd-numbered year. What makes the story so tragic is that Madeleine would never get to hear it, Madeleine who so loved Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne’s stories. She had, of course, heard snatches of it from the Horse’s mouth before, but not all the details, not those that Floria Ironstone would share with her teal-eyed daughter, Penelope Ironstone. It happened at the county fair.

The St. Lawrence County Fair was, until the invention of the television, both the most predictable and the most surprising fair in all of New York State. The 1939 edition was no exception, so much so that for a long time afterward many believed that the devil himself had marked the date on his calendar. Floria Ironstone wouldn’t have missed the St. Lawrence County Fair for the world. She had checked with Old Whitman no fewer than eight times: he had promised to come by to pick her and her sister Beth up in his truck on the first Saturday in August at 7 a.m. sharp. When there was no sign of the truck at the time they had agreed on, Beth sighed.

“We’ll go next year. There’ll still be music next year, Floria.”

Floria was in tears on the porch. She hadn’t missed a single St. Lawrence County Fair since she’d turned eighteen. She’d always found a way to get there, in Old Whitman’s truck or by bus, and writing it off altogether was out of the question. Now where had Old Whitman gotten to?

Just as all seemed lost, the Ironstone sisters heard the truck’s engine rev and splutter.

“Sorry I’m late, ladies. Little Adolf here wasn’t too keen. He’s a bit of a nervous nelly, but if you ask me that’s a sign of character.”

“Why, Mr. Whitman! He’s absolutely enormous! You won’t be coming home empty-handed this year, I’m sure of it! Now what do you think of my skirt? Mamma made it.”

“Not bad at all. But why so red? You’ll be seen for miles around!”

“Let’s just say I don’t plan to go unnoticed.”

The truck had pulled up in front of the two young women, both dressed in their Sunday best, now radiant in the morning sun. Behind the slats a curious black eye looked out at them. It belonged to Adolf, an oversized calf that had been lovingly fattened on a steady diet of grain. Whitman’s every hope rested on the calf that Saturday in August 1939. An ardent admirer of Nazi Germany from the very beginning, Old Whitman had named his calf after the Führer, the same Führer whose photograph he had pinned above the calf’s paddock and stall in the hopes that the dictator’s unwavering stare, which had saved Germany from destitution and famine, would work the same magic on the animal. His hopes were realized beyond even his wildest dreams. The animal thrived and grew, valiantly turning into muscle all the grain and hay that could be found for him. Its coat took on the sheen of a ribbon winner and the animal, through some inexplicable phenomenon of transubstantiation, developed the same gaze as the man whose first name it bore: it was as though the calf could peer right into the depths of your soul, a certain jaded affection in its eyes, with a je ne sais quoi of Alpine ingenuousness that had convinced Whitman that glory was lying in wait, that he would be returning home that very evening brandishing the three-colored ribbon of the St. Lawrence County Fair. Where there is discipline and self-sacrifice there is hope, as would soon be proven to the state of New York.

“He’s as clear-sighted as the Führer!” Whitman thundered as he slammed the door of his Ford.

No, Whitman would not be returning home empty-handed. He looked the two sisters up and down. It all depends how you look at it, he thought to himself: in the eyes of the young men of St. Lawrence County, the girls, so eager to whirl their skirts at the county fair, could pass for two fine ladies; but to the ladies of the Temperance League, they’d be denounced as a couple of shameless hussies.

“Dressed like that, you might not be coming home at all!”

Old Whitman was fond of the girls, even if they were a bit odd. They had been raised by a crotchety Hungarian widow who’d lived in an old wooden home on the outskirts of Potsdam since 1933. Born a Nowak in Vienna and later married to an Eisenstein from Budapest, the Hungarian lady had become an Ironstone in America. The name, it seemed to him, brought to mind her strong character and robust constitution. The two girls, born in Budapest to different fathers who happened to be sworn enemies, had come to America before they had time to form a single memory of the Old World. First came Floria, the eldest, named after the heroine of Tosca, an opera that Mrs. Eisenstein—now Ironstone—had seen several times in Vienna and that had shaken her to the core, particularly the scene in Act II in which the heroine, Floria Tosca, stabs to death the frightful Scarpia, head of the police in Rome, before removing from his still-warm clutches the safe conduct that will allow her to flee the city with her lover. Floria Ironstone’s sister Beth, born two months before the family left for America, was named after Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Every summer, Whitman would take the Ironstone sisters to the St. Lawrence County Fair out of Christian charity. “If I don’t, who will?” would say the old cattle breeder who, in 1939, after a series of lean years brought about by lean cattle, was about to present handsome Adolf, the biggest, the fattest, the strongest, and the most mouth-watering calf ever seen south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi.

At the behest of Old Whitman, who wanted to get his calf in the right frame of mind for the fair, the Ironstone sisters sang as they made their way along the road to Gouverneur; then the old cattle man gave them a lesson on hard-working Germany and its great Führer, explaining among other things that the German chancellor had managed to accomplish in four years what no American president would ever achieve in a lifetime: give every citizen a motor car.

“They all have Volkswagens. The people’s car! And just look at our jalopies, still dragged along by horses. America the beautiful indeed!”

Flooring his poor old Ford pickup, Whitman overtook a buggy drawn by an emaciated grey mare, and as he passed it he bellowed out a “Heil Hitler!” loud enough to be heard on the other side of the Adirondacks. The poor countryfolk, who could see nothing but the head of the hulking brown calf staring out at them from the back of the truck, thought for a moment they were under attack as the driver struggled to prevent the startled horse from dragging the carriage and its occupants into the ditch.

Whitman and the girls arrived at the fairground around eight o’clock, agreed to meet that afternoon at the paddock where the ribbons and awards were to be handed out, then joined the crowds of fairgoers. Floria and Beth spent the first hour walking arm in arm between the shooting galleries, canvas tents, and enclosures where terrifically fat peony-pink piglets sniffed and snorted. Beyond the stands that had been erected for the occasion and beneath a sky alive with swooping swallows, there stood columns of cages filled with farmyard birds and their comical-looking feathers: spherical guinea-fowl speckled with white, immaculate Cochin China chickens, Rhode Island Reds with their scarlet combs, geese that stuck out their necks to nip at Floria’s and Beth’s stockinged legs, quails that clucked tenderly, a handful of domesticated partridges, and ruling proudly over the rest of the farmyard, having left its cage to parade before the people of New York State, a large, magnificent peacock whose beauty instantly turned the Ironstone sisters into pillars of salt.

“Look, Floria! A peacock!”

“How handsome he is. He’s the handsomest of all the birds.”

“Do you think he’ll fan his tail?”

“We’ll have to find him a peahen.”

“No peahen . . . Poor little peacock.”

“Don’t you worry about him, Beth. When you’re that handsome, being unhappy isn’t even an option.”

As though to show the Ironstone sisters he could read their minds, and for their own pure wonderment, the peacock half displayed its feathers’ color. Fairgoers bunched around the crates to admire the huge, vain bird that was visibly aware of the commotion it was causing. Then the miracle happened: the peacock fanned its tail wide, to the applause of the crowd. The bird seemed more surprised than anyone at how big its body had become, as though this morning pavane was the very first time it had ever unfurled its feathers. The bird haughtily studied the people who were so fascinated by its colors. One idiot thought it a good idea to throw the bird a piece of bread as a reward. The peacock took it as a provocation, stood stock-still, looked out at the crowd, and drawled: Leooona! Leooona! Floria and Beth Ironstone clapped in delight. The audience, charmed by the display, looked on at the young girl in the red skirt who was filled with wonder at such a simple spectacle.

“His bride-to-be is called Leona! Ha! Ha!”

At noon, after the first horse and buggy races were over, the Ironstone sisters ate the hunk of dark bread and the apples they had brought with them from Potsdam and bought lemonade. Sitting on the grass beneath a maple tree, they discussed handsome Adolf’s chances of winning the three-colored ribbon. What they had seen in the enclosures had worried them. Other animals from Utica, Watertown, Canton, and even Canada might just as easily take home the honors. Beth was pensive.

“Do you think Adolf realizes he’s being watched and judged? He’s only a calf, after all!”

“Of course he does. The peacock knew we were watching, didn’t it? Why wouldn’t the calf?”

“You’re right. Handsome Adolf is probably polishing his hoofs as we speak.”

On the main stage, the Ogdensburg brass band had just given way to a square-dancing performance that was boring Floria and Beth silly. They redid their hair, shook off the dust and straw that clung to their skirts, and decided to explore the parts of the exhibition they had never visited before, on the other side of the horse-racing track.

A large tent of coarse canvas loomed before them, set a little back from the fairground. From it emanated occasional deep manly cheers, rounds of applause, dull thuds, and, now and then, for no more than a second or two at a time, absolute silence. Whatever was happening there appeared to be taking the audience’s breath away. Each silence was followed by a spontaneous explosion of shouting, whistling, and exclamations of astonishment and amazement. Floria and Beth approached the entrance to the tent, which had been tied closed with rope. Consumed by curiosity, they called out four or five times before a portly gentleman with a moustache came to untie one of the cords that was keeping the mysterious performance hidden away from curious eyes.

“And what can I do for you ladies?”

“We want to see what’s in here,” replied Floria.

“It’s a show for gentlemen.”

“What do you mean, gentlemen?” asked Floria, more curious than ever.

“Strongmen. It’s no show for ladies.”

“Well then, today we’re no ladies,” Floria retorted, shoving the huge man aside.

The man watched the sisters walk inside, his gaze lingering on Floria’s red skirt, and thought to himself: “Not today, and not tomorrow either.”

The older sister took the younger by the hand and now they were pushing their way through a crowd of men, all of whom were taller, bigger, and sturdier than they were. An indefinable perfume of leather, sweat, and testosterone hung in the air. Floria noticed right away that the doorman had lied: they weren’t the only women in the crowd. A few old biddies were sitting in the lowest tiers, one of them shaking her fist and shouting something in a Slavic language. As her eyes took in the stage, Floria realized that the contestants were lifting off the dirt floor a black weight on which “300 lb.” had been painted in white. A tall blond man with blue eyes stood to let the newcomers take his place in the stands. “Please, ladies . . .” How many people were looking on from the V-shaped stands? Three hundred? Four hundred? One thousand, by the sounds of it. A master of ceremonies—black suit, bow tie, slicked-back hair, shiny shoes, gold watch, eyes puffy from the heat in the tent—announced the upcoming contest.

“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 squint 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.

Puffing and blowing like a steam engine, Idaho Bill was radish-red and making headway in second place. Of this interesting character, it should be said that he did not in fact hail from Idaho, but rather from California, where he had been baptized Everett Sterling in Sacramento in 1918. How had he wound up competing as a strongman in the Midwest and Northeastern United States? The answer depends a lot on who you ask. What we do know is that Idaho Bill did live at one time in Idaho, where he had been a cowboy or a lumberjack—accounts differ—and that he had decided to call himself Bill after a price was put on the head of a certain Everett Berling (in the wake of a sordid sex scandal that also involved the governor of Oregon’s brother) in four states right at the start of the Roosevelt administration, an event that dealt a severe blow to his career as a strongman. It was this version of the story that was told most often; when Bill was around, at least. And just in front of him was The Warsaw Giant, advancing with no apparent effort, a man whose nickname required no explanation: standing more than six foot six inches tall, he towered over most of his fellow contenders by at least a head, sometimes two, meaning that his regular walking pace was enough to win him the car-pulling event, a feat he accomplished to the sounds of a crestfallen crowd that was rooting for the Canadian out of sympathy for Floria and Beth. Aware that his victory had disappointed the crowd while putting a little spice back into the contest, The Warsaw Giant looked around sadly. In his native Poland, his victory would have been met with adulation, but here it seemed only to stoke the fairgoers’ desire to see the Canadian win the day, an outcome that was looking increasingly uncertain. With a ballerina-like flourish, The Warsaw Giant crossed the finish line that had been whitewashed onto the warm green grass, as Floria and Beth Ironstone looked on in dismay. Not wanting to break the titan’s heart, the crowd applauded all the same. Idaho Bill finished far behind, cursing the heavens for not being taller. Then came Louis Lamontagne, Alexander Podgórski—whose squint returned as soon as he was freed from his harness—and finally the now Not So Great Brouyette, who never did manage to make up the ground he lost by falling on his ass two seconds after the race started, caught up in his own harness. The passengers who had been used as ballast stepped out of the Oldsmobile one by one, swapping notes on the incredible race, laughing at the master of ceremonies’s quips, and waving to the crowd, feeling a few crumbs of the Polish champion’s glory fall on their own shoulders. The passengers from the winning car scoffed at the losers, taking credit, however undeserved, for their beast of burden’s win.

But outright victory still wasn’t completely in The Warsaw Giant’s hands, far from it. His long legs might have won him the third event, but this easy win wasn’t enough to surpass Lamontagne’s triumphs in the first two events, the bent press and the squat lift. Which meant that Lamontagne had come out of the first two events with six points, comfortably ahead of The Warsaw Giant, who had only four points to show for having twice finished second. After his victory in the car pull, The Warsaw Giant now had seven points, tied with Louis Lamontagne, who had had to make do with a solitary point for his third-place finish. Disappointed but not disheartened, Lamontagne vowed he would do better in the final event.

Among the crowd of visitors to the St. Lawrence County Fair, the Ironstone sisters weren’t the only ones praying with all their might that the Canadian might take a shine to them. Louis’s guilelessness, youth, vigor, and simplicity had conquered the hearts of every last fairgoer. They loved him for all kinds of reasons: languidness, admiration, a fascination for his extraordinary physique. And while it is undeniable that certain young ladies would have immediately taken the handsome devil up on an offer to dance, parental consent be damned, it would not be true to say that all of St. Lawrence County was drawn to him for reasons of the heart. Louis Lamontagne’s presence was a source of fascination, inexplicably soothing and exciting at once. A mere glance from Louis was enough to awaken the best and the worst of the man—or especially the woman—his eyes happened to fall on. Louis was to the St. Lawrence County Fair what Marlene Dietrich was to the American troops: the charms, at once sophisticated and unrefined, of a vague elsewhere, a promise of something new. At a time when Uncle Sam was recruiting men the length and breadth of the United States, a handful of his agents were naturally at the county fair and, scattered throughout the crowd, had immediately remarked the five rivals in the strongman competition and were now waiting for events to follow their course.

The master of ceremonies decreed a two-hour break to let the strongmen recover and allow the crowd to refresh itself, what with the heavy air that foretold a late-afternoon storm. No doubt to maintain the air of mystery that surrounded him and seemed to have worked to his advantage so far, Louis Lamontagne took care to keep a safe distance from the crowd that had gathered around the competitors as soon as they were out of their harnesses. People scrambled to see him up close, to touch him with their own hands, to see him with their own eyes, but the Canadian preferred to play hard to get, heading off to the privacy of a trailer a little to the side of the field, flanked by his cross-eyed colleague. The Ironstone sisters sighed.

“Come on, Floria. Let’s go talk to them! I’m sure they have whisky in that trailer!”

“Mmm. A little shot of Canadian whisky. They’re bound to have some.”

Beth was taken aback at her own daring. Her sister followed behind, trying to hide her jitters. Both men disappeared into the trailer. Two scrawny horses grazed a few yards away. How many times did Floria rearrange her hair as she approached Louis Lamontagne’s trailer? Which of the two was more nervous at the prospect of speaking to the young man? Who among the rest of the crowd had failed to notice that these brash young things had plucked up enough courage to do what they all dreamed of doing? So many unanswered questions. A door on the side of the trailer opened with a loud crack, revealing Louis Lamontagne and Alexander Podgórski sitting on wooden stools in surroundings that were far too small for two men of their size. Before them on the table was what looked like an enormous turkey, which Podgórski had brought back with him from Buffalo. Strangled and roasted the day before by a helpful woman from Gouverneur (the strongmen were welcomed like kings wherever they went), the bird was equal to the two huge appetites. For the Ironstone sisters, it made for a moving scene: two strapping young men who had given their all and were now sharing a gargantuan meal in a trailer where trapeze artists, lion tamers, bearded ladies, and dwarfs would not have been out of place. Louis was busy tearing one of the thighs off the huge bird. Floria, her hopefulness winning out over bashfulness, as was her way, got straight to it:

“I so wanted you to win, Horse!”

“So did I,” her sister Beth chimed in. “But I’m certain you’ll win the horse event! We saw you in the tent. You’re so strong! I’m Beth, and this is my sister, Floria. We’re from Potsdam.”

Beth pointed east. Both men, who were busily wolfing down their meal, glanced up at the two women, chewed some more, then swallowed. They wiped their lips and smiled. Lamontagne’s English was fairly basic. He would intersperse his speech with snatches of French—which Podgórski would translate, sometimes hesitantly due to the often mystifying Canadian accent—then go on, giving the impression the sisters were speaking to a two-headed man, one speaking something akin to English in a thick Slavic accent, the other impeccable Frenglish, embellished with sweeping hand gestures, facial expressions, and mannerisms that formed the grammar of his language every bit as much as his vocabulary. Floria and Beth wanted to know everything: Where from? How? When?

Podgórski told them he had been born in Warsaw in 1918 to an unknown father and an uncertain mother. He had been raised by anyone and everyone, fed more often than not by the nuns in the Praga neighborhood, the first to become aware of young Alexander’s uncommon strength. At the age of twelve, he was hired by the convent and received full board in exchange for his brute force. When he became too old for the nuns to keep him in their service, he was given the chance to join a religious order in Warsaw. But young Alexander had already begun to display his might in the main squares of Praga, in nearby neighborhoods, and even beyond the Vistula in the more stylish parts of the city. It was at a feat of strength that involved hoisting a barrel of sauerkraut that young Podgórski caught the eye of The Warsaw Giant who, back then, was still known as Wlad. Impressed by the performance of young Podgórski who, without batting an eye or losing his footing, had, before a crowd of four thousand, managed to heft the barrel brimming with sauerkraut off the ground, the Giant had always remembered him and, once established in America, realized the country was big enough for more than one Polish strongman and wrote to the young man back in Warsaw, inviting him to cross the ocean and join him in Baltimore. A whole continent awaited him, a continent partial to shows of strength and muscle, a continent where a Slavic accent was enough to get you hired as a fairground entertainer. The Giant liked to recall the delightful scene in Warsaw: up on the platform, Podgórski’s pronounced squint had left the crowd come to admire the strongmen’s feats in stitches. But their boorish, hurtful laughter gave way to stunned silence once the young man took hold of the barrel, knees bent. At that very moment, his eyes returned to their normal axis, his gaze straight and steady for as long as his muscles were contracted.

“Look! He’s not cross-eyed anymore!” they cried, pointing up at him.

And as the people of Warsaw looked on dumbfounded, Podgórski had not only lifted the barrel of sauerkraut, he’d stopped squinting too. The potential was not lost on The Warsaw Giant.

Alexander had been kind enough to share the barrel of sauerkraut—it was the winner’s to take home—with the sisters of Praga, who received his mail and read his letters to him since the boy, unlike The Warsaw Giant, was completely illiterate. The nuns had been sad to see their protégé and supplier of foodstuffs leave them (the barrel of sauerkraut was not the only bounty that Alexander had brought back to the convent over the course of his last few months in Warsaw). Beer, sausage, unripened cheese, milk, eggs: the youngster’s exploits tended to be rewarded in kind. The nuns of Praga would never again eat so well, and their sadness was great—as was their hunger—when they gathered on the platform at Warsaw station to bid their final farewells to the young man who looked out at them in cross-eyed fondness from the seat paid for by a generous archbishop.

“I’ll come back, sisters! I’ll come back a very rich man indeed!” the boy cried from the window of the train as it pulled slowly out of the station of the hometown he would never see again.

The call of America had long been ringing in Podgórski’s ears, but he decided to give one last chance to Old Europe before crossing the ocean. And so Alexander left for Krakow to join a traveling circus.

It was the Great Krysinski, tamer of big cats and business associate to the owner of a famous German circus, who snatched him away from Poland and had him hit the roads of Germany. Podgórski was a hit wherever he went. “The Cross-Eyed Pole! Come see him cured through hard work!” In Berlin in 1936, Podgórski was the hottest ticket in town, the platform close enough to the crowd that each and every one of them could see the miracle for themselves as he lifted eight Fräulein sitting on a door.

To the delight of the Berlin audience, Podgórski’s cross-eyed squint disappeared the very instant he lifted his head. The usual stunned silence was followed by a burst of laughter and applause. The circus continued on its way through Germany to Strasbourg, where Podgórski was picked up by a French circus, which was delighted with his number that aroused at once admiration, astonishment, and general hilarity, an exploit in itself for a fairground entertainer. And Podgórski thus roamed from town to town in the Third Republic. From Troyes to Sète, from Orange to Angers, and from Cannes to Vannes, he discovered the beautiful country that was France and learned the language of the people—or more specifically, the women—who lived there. The German circus manager had been right about his Polish performer: Podgórski was a randy young fellow, a fact that went completely unnoticed in 1930s France. And if amused reports from any number of his French lovers were to be believed, the Pole also lost his squint at the very height of passion. But Podgórski skipped over this particular detail as he recounted his origins to the Ironstone sisters in the field in Gouverneur. Something told him that, with a little luck and a helping hand from his Canadian colleague, Beth might very well have an opportunity to witness this rare, inexplicable phenomenon for herself by sunrise.

As he explained how fate had brought him to this New York field to drag a black Oldsmobile one hundred yards, a crowd had begun to gather. The onlookers had followed the Ironstone sisters, curious to see just how far the unseemly young ladies would go to win the handsome Canadian’s heart. While their behavior may have been unbecoming, in America’s outlying counties where there was nothing but Deathly Boredom to be had, agricultural fairs had become carnival-like events where propriety and decorum tended to be set aside. After all, weren’t fairs a place to celebrate nature’s bounty and generosity? Standing outside the open trailer, twenty-odd people were now hanging on Podgórski’s every word. Lamontagne used the distraction to gobble up the rest of the roast turkey, tearing it apart, bit by bit. Podgórski ended his story by recounting how in Calais, at the end of a tour that had threatened to take a dramatic turn—another case of ending up in the wrong bed—he had gone to England in the hopes of finding a ship to take him to America. And that’s how he set sail for New York in May 1937, unable to sit still at the thought of discovering a whole new continent of women. In the United States, the Pole discovered a drab, boring country, its cities rough and filthy, its people of no interest to him. The Americans, on the other hand, were fascinated by him. Despite being illiterate, he managed to track down The Warsaw Giant, whose nickname amused him no end. The two men were each delighted to find a compatriot on American soil, but the Giant was of no great use to Podgórski. The troupe he had been traveling with had gone bankrupt in the wake of the Great Depression and all the two men could do was travel across America from town to town, from Sioux to Cheyenne, from Miami to Toledo, from Bismarck to Lafayette, entering strongman contests and renting out their brute strength to industry, agriculture, and the occasional mine. Their trajectories separated, but sometimes they met up again, as in August 1939 in Gouverneur, New York.

Podgórski and Lamontagne had first met at the Montcalm Hall in Montreal, on the corner of Saint-Zotique and De Lorimier. Both were entered in a bench press event that Lamontagne, newly arrived from the depths of the countryside, won hands down. Podgórski, dumbfounded by the young man’s might, wanted to get to know him better in order to uncover the secrets of his strength, and so an admirable symbiotic relationship developed between the two. Young Lamontagne, absurdly handsome and well built, attracted the young women of Montreal to him like a magnet. He would keep his favorite—who, strictly speaking, wasn’t always the prettiest since he was especially partial to big brown eyes, curly hair, and slender hands—and toss his second choice into the waiting arms of Podgórski, who became Lamontagne’s commensal: one who lives with and eats at the same table with another, content with leftovers and causing no harm. In return, Podgórski would interpret into English for Lamontagne. Louis seemed to be on the lookout for what others might have termed “imperfections” among these one-night stands. A gap between two teeth, a few merry pounds too many, a surfeit of freckles . . . every conquest had a particular trait that lingered in his memory. Because, for Louis, that’s what grace was all about. Like braille to the blind man, all that mattered were the little rough spots on the smooth surface of a beautiful woman. He wanted to feel them all. Together Podgórski and Lamontagne had bought the blue wooden trailer from a family of New England dwarfs that had opted for the comforts of sedentary life and now ran a home near Albany where, in return for fifty cents, it was possible to observe them at leisure through a one-way mirror. Tired of staying in seedy hotels, Podgórski and Lamontagne had bought the vehicle—complete with a couple of old nags—for next to nothing and now moved at a snail’s pace along America’s roads.

“And what about you, Mr. Lamontagne. Have you always been so strong?” Beth Ironstone was desperate for the Canadian to speak.

Louis set down the turkey leg he had been picking clean to explain that he couldn’t recall ever being weak. He stood up and, in front of a crowd of onlookers that was growing by the minute, began to explain how he had become known as Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne back in Rivière-du-Loup. Louis flung an apple at a little boy who had been hungrily eyeing the half-eaten turkey. Now, whenever Podgórski interpreted one of Louis Lamontagne’s stories, he would put all his cognitive faculties into the tale, making every effort to come up with just the right word, the best possible expression. His Slavic accent imbued Louis Lamontagne’s stories with an exotic perfume that the American public couldn’t get enough of, fascinated as they were to hear what went on in a land so close recounted with such a distant accent. No matter the hall or field where Lamontagne performed, he always seemed to attract two or three brazen young ladies, and sometimes even a few boys eager to develop a similar build. Saving a young lady for his traveling companion was no hardship. And he couldn’t have dreamed of a more dedicated interpreter to bring the stories from his land of snow to life.

“Do you have a wife, Horse?”

The fateful question slipped out of Floria like a belch and amused the crowd no end. Bracing themselves for disappointment, they expected the Canadian to reply that he was married and to pull a miniature tutu-wearing French Canadian out of a hat for them. They laughed nervously. What could Louis Lamontagne’s wife possibly look like? What Delilah of the North had managed to tame this Samson? Without letting the crowd stew too long, Podgórski delivered the sweetest word in the world to the ears of Floria and Beth: unmarried. The word brought with it hope and promises of better tomorrows. He was young, of course, but didn’t they say that Catholics went about nature’s duties with the utmost diligence? It was conceivable that, despite being only twenty years old, Lamontagne had already sired lots of children. The truth was not far off, but Podgórski knew only the truth that Lamontagne had chosen to reveal. He strongly suspected that his Canadian pal had, just like him, left more than one kid behind along the way, and twice already, in the space of eighteen months spent wandering America, he had witnessed the same scene: a tearful woman would find Louis after two or three months of desperate searching. Show up at an event with the longest of Lent faces. Wait patiently until the very end of the contest, then ask to speak to Louis in private. Would sob. And would leave, defeated. Teal-colored eyes in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan . . . And soon in New York, too. Podgórski, born in similar circumstances and himself father to a multitude of little American bastards, found nothing reprehensible about the matter. The sisters of Warsaw had always told him he was a child of God, and for this simple reason he had nothing to fear from men or their judgment.

“But Louis, wherever did you get those teal-colored eyes?”

“My mother was an American, from New England. She had teal eyes.”

The three hundred or so people now assembled outside the trailer turned to look at each other. An American? So this marvel actually had red, white, and blue roots? With his mysterious past and the innocence associated with every recollection of him, Louis had found a place in the hearts of the visitors to the St. Lawrence County Fair. To the young ladies listening attentively to the two strongmen recount their adventures, Louis was practically an American. A sheep that had strayed north of the border. And to the two US Army recruiters, who hadn’t missed a word of the story from the back row, Louis was more of a lamb ready to be brought into the fold.

In his thick Polish accent, Podgórski interpreted the story of the birth of Louis Lamontagne on December 25, 1918, in the church of Saint-François-Xavier in Rivière-du-Loup. Louis didn’t skimp on the details. He described how his mother, the enigmatic American, had wound up in Canada in the spring of 1918. How she had managed to put Old Ma Madeleine in her back pocket, no matter how wary the matriarch had been, no matter how many times she’d been around the block. How the American had charmed the gluttonous priest, and how, with the horrified parishioners looking on, she’d given birth to Louis Lamontagne at a live nativity scene with the help of Sister Mary of the Eucharist, a midwife whose countenance was enough to stop a hemorrhage in its tracks. Louis pointed to the faint traces the forceps had left on his cheeks: two minuscule furrows across his pink skin, just an inch below his teal-colored eyes, Madeleine the American’s eyes. By the time his story was over, tears were streaming down the women’s cheeks. If Louis had managed to win over the crowd by dint of his handsome features and generous physique, the story of how he came into the world at the tragic midnight mass of 1918 transformed him into a mythical hero who would be spoken of for years to come the length and breadth of St. Lawrence County.

“But if your momma died giving birth to you and your daddy died not long after, who raised you, Horse?”

They were lapping it up. After the tragic demise of Louis-Benjamin Lamontagne—father to Louis Lamontagne and widower to Madeleine the American—the question of who would raise the orphaned boy was in need of a quick answer.

“Sure, I’ll keep him. I won’t have lost a son for nothin’. And at least he didn’t die over in the old countries!”

And so Old Ma Madeleine raised him as her own. She even waited until he turned ten before telling him the story of his birth, a tale he already knew every word of, having picked it up from the local gossips. But it wouldn’t be entirely true to say that Old Ma Madeleine raised the boy alone; after all, it takes a village to raise a colossus his size. Louis Lamontagne was raised as much by his uncle Napoleon Lamontagne, his aunts, his grandparents, the Sisters of the Child Jesus in Rivière-du-Loup, and Father Cousineau, who was particularly fond of the boy. The priest had actually been the first to detect the boy’s natural stage presence, not to mention his incredible strength. And Podgórski told how, in August 1932, at the age of thirteen, Louis, already over six foot tall, had begun to go by the name Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne.

It was on the wedding day of Alphonsine, one of the late Louis-Benjamin’s sisters who had been handed over to a merchant from the lower part of town with a house on one of the streets alongside the bay, a man from Saint-Patrice looking for a devout and industrious housewife. Father Cousineau, saddened to see young Alphonsine leave his parish, offered to take the Lamontagne family in his buggy, a cart owned by the priest but drawn by a mare who belonged to the Sisters of the Child Jesus, a weary, unpredictable old beast who was older than even the nuns could remember. And so they all went, Old Ma Madeleine and her husband, Old Man Lamontagne; their son Napoleon; the three daughters yet to be married off; and, of course, young Louis, who walked beside the buggy. At the end of the ceremony, as the party was preparing to head back to the upper town, the old mare decided to breathe its last. Just like that. Dead as a doornail.

Malicious tongues immediately pointed the finger at Father Cousineau, who was fatter than ever and never thought twice about taking a cart ride all the way out to Cacouna. But the truth was much more mundane: the mare’s time was up, plain and simple. It was sheer chance that it had happened to drop dead during Alphonsine’s wedding. But then again, luck is often no stranger when men are made into heroes.

“Why, our handsome young Louis can pull us up into town!” Father Cousineau had joked, but the young man took him at his word.

Old Ma Madeleine protested loudly and scolded her grandson while his grandfather egged him on, perhaps eager to dish out a lesson in humility to his little Louis, who was a strapping young man indeed, but who was certainly incapable of dragging a whole family back up into town in a cart, with a spherical parish priest on board to boot. The old man laughed up his sleeve. Louis was champing at the bit. Outside the church, the guests looked on in amusement at the antics of the Lamontagne family. In her white dress, young Alphonsine tried to talk Louis out of it.

“You’ll make a mess of your nice clothes!”

The argument didn’t carry much weight. Not as much as Father Cousineau was carrying anyway. He was already in the cart, on the orders of Old Man Lamontagne, squeezed in beside Old Ma Madeleine and her four daughters who were preparing to be humiliated in front of the whole wedding party. To lighten the mood, Father Cousineau gave out a loud “Giddy-up!” and young Louis reacted instantly, thrusting his massive frame forward. And the miracle happened. As smooth as you like, to the gentle creak of axles in need of a good greasing, the cart moved forward, as much to the astonishment of its occupants as to those looking on. Without batting an eyelid, Louis Lamontagne climbed the long slope up Rue Lafontaine, between two rows of spectators decked out in their Sunday best, then onto Rue Saint-Elzéar, finally bringing the cart to a standstill outside the family house on Rue Fraserville, to frenzied applause from a jubilant crowd. Breathless but bursting with pride, Louis Lamontagne was known from that day on as Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne. Podgórski didn’t mention the fact that there was another version circulating in Rivière-du-Loup about the origin of the nickname. Louis, some said, had acquired the name for an entirely different reason. But it was the first version of the story Louis preferred to tell at the strongman competition. The wedding went on for another two days, during which time half an ox, twenty-two chickens, just as many quail, and two hundred ears of freshly picked corn were eaten, with Louis wolfing down twenty by himself.

But it was at the funeral of his grandmother, Old Ma Madeleine, that young Louis Lamontagne provided the most irrefutable demonstration yet of his Herculean strength. On the morning of January 30, 1933, Podgórski explained to the crowd at the St. Lawrence County Fair, death struck Old Ma Madeleine down in her prime.

“The day Adolf Hitler came to power!” a particularly well-informed onlooker felt compelled to share with the others.

On that same day, no one in Rivière-du-Loup had an inkling of what was brewing in Berlin, but news of Old Ma Madeleine’s demise struck everyone like a blow to the heart. No one, not even her husband, was saddened more than Father Cousineau, the first to be called to chant funeral orations over the deceased’s body. It was not yet midday. Old Ma Madeleine had yawned, announced that she had not had enough sleep, that she felt a little worse for wear, and that a morning nap would have her feeling right as rain in no time at all.

“And my arm hurts too! It hurts like the dickens.”

At noon, the whole family—Napoleon, Louis, the three girls, and Old Man Lamontagne—sat down, absolutely famished, to an empty table. The table hadn’t been set, there wasn’t a plate in sight. They looked at the clock. Were they mistaken? They found her in bed, smiling, feet and hands crossed, head wrapped in the mauve kerchief she always wore when taking a nap. They took off the scarf. Her eyes were staring out at the bare branch of a maple tree swaying in the winter breeze. A bright light, bleak and cold, flooded the room. It was Old Man Lamontagne who closed her eyes. Father Cousineau arrived soon after.

“Her heart?”

“Or her soul?”

“And how old was Old Ma Madeleine anyway?”

Podgórski translated as best he could the fact that no one in Rivière-du-Loup was altogether sure of Old Ma Madeleine’s age. Born in Kamouraska to a family that had long since passed on, she had lived her life without a birth certificate. On the day of her wedding, she had made up a birth date to keep the priest happy and never spoken of her roots again. Her husband was puzzled. Her heart? Yes, no doubt her heart had suddenly stopped beating.

The wake was held in the Lamontagne home. There filed past Old Ma Madeleine’s open casket, in order, three of her cousins who were still alive and had made the trip over from Kamouraska, all the Sisters of the Child Jesus, Father Cousineau, the worthies of Rivière-du-Loup, her children, her son-in-law, and, finally, young Louis Lamontagne, the last to kneel before his grandmother’s casket and mumble his way through a prayer amid the crying and the wailing. Since the cousins from Kamouraska were there, the others took the opportunity to ask them a few questions of a practical nature.

“What should we put for the year of birth on the gravestone?”

“We don’t know. Madeleine was our older sister. She was already married by the time we were women.”

“Did she leave behind a birth certificate? A certificate of baptism?”

“Nothing. All we have left of her is a pair of socks she knit for her father in 1898 or 1899, we’re not exactly sure.”

“But she must have a date of birth.”

“She never spoke of it. She never talked about herself. She was a humble, simple woman.”

Meanwhile, Louis stumbled his way through the Our Father, skipping a syllable or two. “Give us this day our bread and forgive us our trespasses . . .”

“Our daily bread!” Old Ma Madeleine cut in, lying there in her casket and causing everyone at the wake to fall silent.

“She’s right, Louis. You missed a word. It’s ‘our daily bread.’”

Shamefacedly, Louis corrected himself and closed his eyes. Father Cousineau gave him a clip around the back of the head.

“. . . our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and deliver us from evil. Amen.”

“Amen,” chorused the twenty or so people gathered in the Lamontagne’s parlor.

A little white cloud escaped from every mouth because, at Old Man Lamontagne’s request, the windows had all been opened wide so that Old Ma Madeleine’s remains would not decompose before her far-flung relations could make it to the wake. It was just as well she’d died in January: those who die in July are buried before there’s time for their grandchildren’s prayers to be heard. The deceased’s daughters served hot tea while Father Cousineau continued the orations alone, this time in Latin, a language in which he was unlikely to be contradicted by a dead, illiterate old woman. A handful of contemplative nuns from the Order of Saint Clare, who had just settled in Rivière-du-Loup, were next to visit the dead woman in the cold house, notably Sister Mary of the Five Wounds, Sister Mary Saint Paul of Jesus, and Sister Jesus Mary Joseph, formidable prayers every one of them, come to relieve the mourners of their duties toward the departed. Not that the Sisters of the Child Jesus were lacking in piety, far from it. Their orations were every bit the equal of the Order of Saint Clare’s, but let’s just say that when a Poor Clare begins to pray anyone else is destined to finish a poor second. If it had been a matter of teaching someone to read or bringing a child into the world, they would have been spared the visit from the contemplative nuns, but instead there they were, brought up from the lower town by sled along icy, dangerous roads. They arrived just as Father Cousineau’s stomach was beginning to rumble.

“I have some roast and potatoes left over in a pot,” Old Ma Madeleine muttered to the parish priest, no stranger to his insatiable appetite.

The old woman sighed. Now they wanted to know—since she seemed clear-headed enough—what she had done with the sugar. Instead of wearing herself out giving instructions she’d only have to repeat the following day, Old Ma Madeleine got up to fetch the sugar bowl herself before returning to her casket.

Cousineau and Louis took refuge in the kitchen—the only warm room in the house—to vie for the leftover roast, while the Poor Clares, indistinguishable in identical habits that revealed only the middle of their bloodless, angular faces, took turns reciting a series of rosaries that went on for three days and four nights, until they were absolutely certain that Old Ma Madeleine’s soul was resting in peace. Old Ma Madeleine, meanwhile, joined in fervently with the Hail Marys and the Creeds, delighted to see such a fuss being made about her. The Poor Clares eventually returned to their monastery, leaving behind a house in mourning and a perplexed Old Ma Madeleine. Sister Mary of the Five Wounds whispered some words of reassurance in the dead woman’s ear on her way out.

“Real rest is still to come. This first death has freed you of your earthly obligations. You can stay on for a long time yet, until your real rest begins. But rest assured: we only die twice.”

What she meant by that, while not in so many words, was that Old Ma Madeleine would never again have to sweep a floor, knead dough, nail down a shingle, shovel snow, bring children into the world by the dozen, knit their clothes, chop wood, haul rocks, take care of the poor and the innocent, train animals, drag home huge slabs of meat to satisfy Louis’s appetite, watch over the sick, console the unfortunate, suffer through the itchy dry skin of winter and the insect bites of summer, crush beneath her heel the mice that nibbled away at her flour reserves, beware her neighbors, pray on her knees, pray lying down, or pray standing up. In short, she had been freed from her life as a French-Canadian woman.

There was not a hint of the fragrance of flowers in the air of the Lamontagne parlor: it was January. Only a handful of funeral wreaths of willow, fir, and cedar released a resinous perfume into the frigid air. And so died Old Ma Madeleine, on the very same day that Adolf Hitler was named chancellor in Berlin. The good woman wasn’t one to make a fuss, and so she answered the nun with no more than a weak “That’s what I was wondering, too.” By this, she meant that she had understood. She would take it easy until she died a second time. She would be allowed to do some light housework: hulling strawberries, shelling peas, coring apples, that kind of thing, to relieve the boredom at harvest time. They asked Old Ma Madeleine what she thought of it all, if she was glad to be dead or if she would have liked to have lived a while longer.

“I have to say, I’m mighty relieved,” came the reply.

In Gouverneur, the temperature was reaching a record high, but nothing in this world could have persuaded the crowd to move from the trailer where Podgórski regaled them with stories of an ice-filled world, a cooling breath on foreheads that glistened with sweat. They imagined the soothing caress of snow on damp skin, they began to dream of frost-covered windows, of the echo that can only be heard in wintry lands: the crisp clarity of a shouted voice across a snowy field, the sound of the cold. Better than a rain shower in May, the story of Old Ma Madeleine’s funeral had brought relief from the oppressive heat to the people of Gouverneur and beyond. Louis was doing them good, and Floria was more than willing to pay him back in his own coin on New York’s behalf. A photographer’s flash went off: two strongmen immortalized in their trailer, sitting around a half-eaten turkey and grinning. The contest would be starting up again. The crowd left the men to their stretching.

Excited to the roots of their hair, Beth and Floria Ironstone were the first to reach the venue for the final event: the horse lift. The animal in question was already standing beside a pole similar in size to a telephone pole, in which iron rods had been inserted about a foot apart. Each competitor had to mount the horse—the most docile animal in the county—then, secured to the saddle with a harness whose broad straps covered his shoulders, hoist himself thirty feet up off the ground—with the terrified animal strapped onto his rear end—while clinging onto the post’s iron rods, the post itself securely anchored in the ground. It was known in the industry as a “summer event,” quite simply because it was difficult to organize in the theater halls that hosted the shows once the cold weather set in. Another challenge was to find a sufficiently obedient animal that would put up with a slow skyward ascent five times in a row; plus, needless to say, an owner with nerves of steel who would allow their animal to take part in the dangerous game. As luck would have it, all these conditions came together in Gouverneur, and the master of ceremonies beckoned the crowd to come gather around the strange-looking pole. The Warsaw Giant, Idaho Bill, The Great Brouyette, then Podgórski and Lamontagne formed a ring around the master of ceremonies and drew straws to determine who would hoist the horse first. The Giant got the nod, followed by Podgórski, Idaho Bill, Brouyette, and, lastly, handsome young Louis.

The horse bore The Warsaw Giant’s 220 pounds without complaint. The contender was strapped to the saddle with the harness and the horse’s saddle straps checked one last time. Then everyone held their breath. This was an especially dangerous event: once the strongman reached the top of the pole, he could lose his grip at any moment and come crashing down to the ground with his mount. It was up to the Giant and the others to use their heads and be a good judge of just how strong they were. The Giant got halfway up the pole, but was forced to turn back before reaching the top. His forearms had begun to shake, a clear sign that he was close to letting go. A nervous murmur rippled through the crowd. With a tear in his eye, the Giant waited until he was released from his harness before uttering what must have been a Polish profanity. Podgórski crossed himself and looked offended. The Giant spat angrily before striding off. He was known to be a proud man; it was better to stay out of his way whenever the red mist descended.

Podgórski looked Beth in the eye as he was hooked up to the horse. He had secretly decided she was prettier than her sister. But Beth had no idea the Pole was eyeing her so greedily. The sad fate of the Warsaw orphan meant that, due to his squint, girls could never tell when he was looking at them. Determined to engrave himself in Beth’s memory forever, Podgórski grasped the first iron rod with a firm right hand. His muscles went hard and his eyes immediately returned to their normal axis. The crowd aahed in admiration. A few laughs rang out. As he climbed the rungs, Beth couldn’t help but admit he was actually quite a dashing young man.

“Such a shame that he’s cross-eyed the rest of the time,” she whispered to her sister, who had also fallen under the spell of Podgórski’s unwavering gaze as he strained to lift the calm and sleepy horse off the ground.

Invigorated by the thought of Beth Ironstone, Podgórski reached the top of the pole without even realizing it. He climbed back down slowly and the crowd sighed in admiration once the horse’s hoofs touched the ground. Beth quivered with joy.

Next, Idaho Bill took his turn. He huffed and he puffed, and managed to haul his load almost to the top of the pole, higher than The Warsaw Giant at any rate, but not right to the top like Alexander Podgórski. He had to turn back four rungs from the top. The Great Brouyette, meanwhile, went into the horse lift with nothing to lose. He had barely gotten over his shameful fall at the start of the car pull, and this time only a win would allow him to save face. The good man also managed to lift the horse higher than The Warsaw Giant, but not quite to the top of the pole. He still had three markers left to climb when he made the decision to come back down, to the crowd’s applause.

And so Louis Lamontagne was firmly attached to a horse that would now be subjected to its fifth ascent in a half hour. But an animal has only so much patience. When the mare felt the Canadian’s weight on her backbone, she felt what one, without exaggeration, could only call exasperation. Louis, trailing in the standings, had to win the event if he was to beat The Warsaw Giant. Perhaps he paid too much heed to the distance between the rungs on the pole and not enough to the starts of the animal that was growing restless between his thighs. In any event, he was barely halfway up the pole when the horse awoke from its torpor, whinnied, arched its back, thrashed its legs, thrust its head around, and kicked out, exerting, in short, a tension that was simply too much to bear on Louis’s aching arms. The distraught animal forced him back down the pole. The crowd groaned with disappointment: the favorite had just lost a make-or-break event. Some tried to convince the master of ceremonies to give Louis Lamontagne a second chance, but all of his rivals were up in arms at the idea, apart from Podgórski that is, who had no hope of winning the contest anyway. The crowd’s pleas failed to move the master of ceremonies. The contest rules were clear. To win the horse lift, a strongman needed to rely not only on his muscles, but on his ability to calm his mount, which Lamontagne had manifestly failed to do. Three points went to Alexander Podgórski, two to The Great Brouyette, and one to Idaho Bill. The two great rivals, Louis Lamontagne and The Warsaw Giant, were tied. But there’s nothing more disappointing than an even number at the top of the standings. There can only be one winner. The master of ceremonies was ready for this eventuality and announced that, per official contest rules, the men would arm-wrestle for the title. The match would take place immediately, on the outdoor stage where a brass band had just massacred a Viennese waltz or two.

One wooden table. Two chairs. Two arms. One referee.

The only people who remained in the wooden stands had no choice but to be there. The rest of the crowd stood before a stage draped in red, white, and blue and waited to see how the arm-wrestling match would unfold. At the other end of the fairground were stalls and paddocks, where prizes had just been handed out to the cattle and poultry. A turkey answering to the name of Jeanette and an ox called Moby Dick had taken home top honors. A special mention was awarded to the owner of the proud peacock. And to Old Man Whitman’s great distress, poor Adolf had come third in his category.

“He’s a fine-looking animal, is your Adolf, but he’s no match for the competition.”

The judges had shown no mercy to Whitman when he burst into tears. No match, his Adolf? Adolf, whom Whitman had bottle-fed since birth, cuddled, pampered, and loved? They needed their eyes tested. There was just no way! Are you sure? I don’t think he’s any smaller than the others, far from it. And what about his color? Did you see his rich, deep brown? And those big eyes of his? The intelligence behind those eyes. You could almost call it determination. Yessiree! Determination in spades! I demand to see the fair president!

Old Man Whitman had lost it. He was fuming with rage, panting for breath, clutching his left arm, desperately looking around the paddock—anywhere—for someone to stand up for him, lend him moral support, tell him it was all a dream, nothing but a bad joke. Alone in the paddock, waiting for his owner to come get him, Adolf brooded. He was a sensitive soul, feeling Whitman’s every emotion as his own, as though the two were one on a metaphysical level. Whitman wrapped his arms around Adolf’s neck, whispering words of consolation into his ear between heartrending sobs. Embarrassed onlookers began to drift away. And the animal, just like Whitman, began to feel that the dice were loaded, that he was part of a sorry production whose sole aim was to hold him up to ridicule, to humiliate and insult him. And to what end? Why such injustice? Adolf began to stamp his feet. He could no longer bear to see Whitman sobbing. He grew restless, and instead of returning quietly to his bullpen, he broke into a run, all forelegs, letting out a bellow, a D-sharp announcing the end of the world.

Up on stage at the other end of the fairgrounds, Louis Lamontagne, sitting across from The Warsaw Giant, was thanking the heavens that he wouldn’t have to face his trusty companion Podgórski. His squint would no doubt have put him off, perhaps even have left him rolling around with laughter. Of all the feats of strength he had accomplished, this arm-wrestle would live longest in his memory. Getting the better of The Warsaw Giant would be no mean task, but he was counting on the energy the crowd was sending him to unsettle his rival and give him the upper hand. He would stare at him with his teal-colored eyes, show him pupils like those of the stained-glass Madonnas and martyrs the sun shone through in Catholic churches. Would he fall under his spell? The Giant awaited the signal from the master of ceremonies, eager to be done with this trifling Canadian who, not content with stealing his fellow countryman away from him, was now resorting to cockamamie stories to get the crowd behind him. Who said this greenhorn was handsome? And what of the moustache that made him look like he was trying too hard to be Clark Gable? Wasn’t that enough to give everyone a good laugh? And what gave this young upstart the right to be winking at the ladies in the crowd? Ladies? I’ll give you ladies. When I’ve smashed your wrist against this table, when the boards have shattered under the phalanges of your fingers, when I’ve ground your metacarpus to a pulp, you’ll see why they call me The Warsaw Giant. If the crowd had been able to read the two men’s thoughts, it would likely have booed the Giant for all it was worth.

“I love you, Horse!”

It was a woman’s voice. Beth stared hard at the grass, ashamed to death of her sister. The Giant frowned while the emcee’s frail little hand clutched the men’s wrists.

“Ready and go!”

The first few seconds were unbearable for the Ironstone sisters, the Giant almost managing to pin Louis’s hand to the table. But Louis, having lost his composure for an instant, recovered himself at the last moment to pull his wrist up and away from the table. The Giant’s strength was colossal. Straining for all he was worth, Louis felt his toes spreading apart like the five arms of a starfish. Red in the face, muscles bursting at the seams, the two strongmen put on a spectacular show for Gouverneur, one that would surely last no more than a few seconds. Prayers went up. People shouted the Canadian’s name. The Giant foamed at the mouth. Some onlookers began to take bets, while others quite simply lost their heads in the suffocating heat. They wanted one thing and one thing only: for a winner to be declared so that they could go jump into the water to cool off. They shouted, they yelled, they kicked up such a racket that both men struggled to keep their concentration. The Warsaw Giant rolled a rather worrying black eye. An eye that had never been so big, so black. It was the eye of an animal. Just as Louis thought he had mustered enough strength to overpower his opponent, a frightful howl came up from the public enclosure.

“Adoooooolf!”

The cry was repeated, swelling until it became a clamor through which appeals to God himself could clearly be heard. Alarmed at a din that no longer bore any resemblance to shouts of encouragement, Louis and The Warsaw Giant stole a glance at the crowd. And what a sight they saw: Old Man Whitman running along behind his bull calf as it galloped full tilt toward the terrified spectators.

There was no doubt about it: the animal was charging straight toward the stage, apparently excited by the red, white, and blue banners adorning it. The crowd split in two like the Red Sea before Moses’s staff, leaving the Ironstone sisters alone at the foot of the stage, petrified, staring at the furious bull as it charged at them, head down. The calf stopped twenty yards from Floria—now reduced to no more than a squeal—hypnotized by her red skirt. The shouting and screaming stopped suddenly. The crowd could actually be heard breathing in time with the calf. Then, without warning, it rushed forward! Alexander Podgórski, courage his only guide, dashed out from backstage where he had been watching the arm-wrestling contest and swept in like an acrobat before Floria and Beth. His years with the circus had not been in vain. Squinting like crazy, he stood there, his huge arms wide, waiting for the bull to advance. He didn’t have to wait long. It charged! It struck! Its little horns gored the Pole! The animal was furious! The crowd ran for its life, leaping over fences, escaping the frightful carnage as best it could. Podgórski was unsteady on his feet, but still standing. He didn’t see the second charge coming. And now Adolf’s violent blow knocked the poor boy to the ground. It was the painful snapping sound of Podgórski’s bones being trampled by Adolf that brought Louis Lamontagne out of his torpor. The despairing shouts were growing louder.

“Help him! Do something!”

Lamontagne was only too happy to oblige. He planted himself directly in the path of the animal, which looked up at him. God was again called upon, more insistently than ever. And perhaps the devil, too, because the bull had less luck with the Canadian. Wild with rage, Adolf ran full tilt at Louis. The strongman stepped aside at the last second, and the calf went crashing into the oak planks. The animal disappeared beneath the stage, seemed to whirl around once or twice, and let out a bellow that was amplified by the wooden structure that held it prisoner. Then Louis quickly made up his mind and slipped beneath the stage himself.

“Don’t go, Horse! It’s still alive!” Floria cried.

And that’s exactly what Louis was hoping for. He stuck his head out and shouted something at the master of ceremonies, who had hidden underneath a tarpaulin at the first glimpse of the animal steaming toward them. He handed Louis a thick cable that had been used to attach one of the strongmen to an Oldsmobile. The Canadian dived back in under the stage. A thunderous but short-lived battle ensued, of which nothing at all could be seen. The calf bellowed, stamped its feet, struck out. Louis could be heard swearing in French. Then nothing. After what seemed an eternity to Floria and Beth, Louis slowly emerged into the daylight, dragging the bull behind him, its feet bound tightly and its eyes round with surprise. In no time at all, twenty armed men surrounded the animal, each vying to be the first to plant a bullet between its eyes. Age won out.

“But that’s my Adolf. You can’t just—”

Nobody listened to another word from Old Man Whitman. Four shots rang out. Adolf was no more. The words “filthy beast,” “good riddance,” and “may the devil take him” traveled from mouth to mouth. A silent crowd formed a circle around Podgórski’s body. Someone went to look for a priest. Podgórski was rid of his squint once and for all, his belly torn open, his ribs broken. Beth, tears in her eyes, held his hand, and, kneeling down just in time to bless his soul, a Catholic priest mumbled a few words in Latin over the orphan so far, so very far from Warsaw. The body was still twitching. A death rattle rose high into the American sky. Louis approached, repeating in French the prayers the priest had reeled off in English as though to be sure they were understood by God, because French Canadians are the only people in the world who believe that God is a French speaker. And Podgórski went on dying, determined to leave the world behind him.

“We only die twice, Podgórski,” Louis muttered pointlessly, forgetting in his grief that a miracle is no longer considered a miracle if it happens too often. And in vain he intoned “our daily bread, our daily bread, our daily bread, our daily bread” until he was led gently away.

Louis was declared the winner and pocketed the tidy sum of two hundred dollars. Given the circumstances, there were no celebrations. Louis returned alone to his trailer, at once victorious and defeated. The Pole would be buried in the nearby cemetery the following day; the priest who had performed the last rites had agreed to officiate the funeral. The Giant promised to write to the nuns of Warsaw, who would long lament the fate reserved for their beloved strongman. But they wouldn’t receive the letter until months later, after the capitulation of Warsaw, in the midst of the martyrdom of Poland. Perhaps God had wanted to spare Alexander from having to watch his people die, they told themselves. The Giant didn’t go into detail about his compatriot’s death, referring only to an unfortunate farm accident. The recruiters from the US Army, astonished by Louis’s exploits, kept a close eye on him as he organized his friend’s funeral. They waited, patient as Sioux, for the young man to go back to his trailer. They even hung back and let Floria knock on the door and spend the night with the Canadian before introducing themselves.

Louis was lying in his trailer, alone in prayer. There was a knock at the door.

“Horse! Open up! It’s me, Floria.”

“I’m praying.”

“Let me pray with you then. I’m so upset. Such a narrow door for a man with such broad shoulders.”

“But we can’t stay here alone. Who saw you come in?”

“No one. Beth is with the priest. She wants to help with the funeral. She was very fond of him. No more than a wink from him and her heart would’ve been his. I would never have thought my sister capable of such a thing.”

“Floria’s your name, right?”

“Yes, as in Floria Tosca. It’s an opera. Do you like opera?”

“Never heard one. Can you stay with me a while?”

“Of course. That’s why I came. To keep you company. It’s really awful what happened to that poor boy . . . Why, you’re crying, Horse!”

“Who’s going to translate my stories? Just listen to me! My English is terrible. Who’s going to pull the trailer while I sleep? Who’s going to keep me company?”

“But your English is not so bad. Give it time. Let time take its course. Here, take my hankie.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind. Podgórski was a poor sleeper. Whenever he couldn’t sleep, he’d say, ‘Hey, Lamontagne, tell me one of your cock-and-bull stories from Canada.’ And I’d tell him a story, any story.”

“And he’d fall asleep?”

“No! He’d want to hear the end. Then he’d fall asleep. That’s how it was. He knew lots of my stories by heart. What a tiny nose you have, Floria . . .”

“Why the cheek of you, Louis Lamontagne!”

“I’m serious! I love your nose! It’s such a cute little nose.”

“And my legs are too thin. That’s what Momma always says.”

“Your legs are magnificent. And now you’re crying too.”

“Do you know what would do us good?”

“No, what?”

“A little whisky! If only we had some . . .”

“Well, actually I do. Right over there. The good stuff, from Canada.”

“Why, what a stroke of luck! I was just thinking that a Canadian must never travel without his whisky.”

“Would you like some?”

“Sure, why not? Twist my arm!”

“Here you go.”

Glug, glug, glug.

“Hey! Easy does it. Not so fast!”

“Oh! This whole business has me so upset. Thank you, Horse. Not only are you the handsomest man I’ve ever laid eyes on, you’re a gentleman too. Oh, your hand is so big and strong.”

“A woman in Michigan once told me that.”

“Kiss me, Louis.”

The night Podgórski died, it rained in Gouverneur. Torrential storms straight out of a Wagner opera. Thick clouds sent to cleanse the earth of the stains of humanity. Once Floria left to spend the night in Gouverneur ahead of Podgórski’s funeral, Louis slept like a baby amid the thunder and lightning. The US Army recruiters were waiting for him the next morning.

“Your mother was an American, we hear . . .”

Two years later, wearing an infantry uniform and having piled on a few extra pounds at Uncle Sam’s mess, handsome Louis set sail for England aboard a ship accompanied by a minesweeper, Will you love me all the time? playing in his mind, his knowledge of Europe amounting to no more than a blurry, quaint image of a small country densely populated with nothing but Polish nuns, strongmen, and mad dictators. Of all the members of his division, Louis Lamontagne was probably the only man there out of love for Poland. He was also the most attractive man aboard. That was beyond a shadow of a doubt.

It wasn’t until December 31, 1999, at the age of forty-nine, that Madeleine decided it was safe to open the letter from Floria Ironstone she had intercepted in 1958. She found two plea-filled pages covered with kisses. The word please appeared six times. Attached to the letter was a photograph of a little girl who had been conceived at the St. Lawrence County Fair in August 1939—Penelope Ironstone, who would wait for her father’s reply for the rest of her life. Madeleine never did try to contact her half-sister, thereby missing out on one of Louis Lamontagne’s most colorful stories.

Like Puccini’s heroine Floria Tosca, Madeleine Lamontagne wasn’t fond of competition. Although it must be said in her defense that most of the women who fell head over heels in love with Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne never did manage to completely recover. His daughter was no exception to the rule.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.