River City (63 page)

“I suppose,” Father O’Malley mused, “that this is why we Americans believe we won. We gained a state. For Maine, we thank you.”

She nodded in agreement, then turned philosophical. “War is such silliness, Father. Montrealers, though, did manage to gain something from the adventure. English, French and Indian—everyone fought shoulder to shoulder to achieve victory. We came together as a people. What vestiges of feeling that remained among the French for France, which you might think would only be natural, dissipated. Madison’s war was a Napoleonic war—we all felt that way. The Americans were doing what they could to help the French engage the English, and if that meant invading Quebec, so be it. We all lost sympathy for France. And the misjudgments of the British were leading us to understand that perhaps someday we must come together to rule ourselves, notwithstanding our growing fidelity to England. So you see, the war has been a significant part of our maturation process, I would say.”

“Not that you advocate war.”

“As little as possible. My nuns are expressly forbidden from shooting one another, although on occasion, I’m sure that they’d like to.”

He smiled. Father O’Malley concluded that whatever Mother McMullen might wish to say to him would be of interest, for clearly she was a keen and perceptive student of history. She had convinced him long ago to revamp his
perspective of the Plains of Abraham, the day that Quebec fell to the British. The cause of the defeat by the French, she had contended, was horsemeat. “Horsemeat?” Father O’Malley repeated.

“Mother d’Youville, our founder, said so herself. She had gone with Sarah Hanson Sabourin, a wonderful woman from the Ottawa River, who had brought along the Cartier Dagger—a relic said to have mystical powers, Father—to a meeting with the governor of Quebec. This was Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil. We were so proud—our first Quebec-born governor. Madame d’Youville and Sarah Hanson Sabourin, with her dagger—she brought it along to lend authority to their mission—requested that Vaudreuil stop feeding horses to his army. The country was in famine. People were eating whatever they could find, and the army was seizing horses. The governor denied their request. Moreover, he informed the ladies that if they did not leave his presence and cease their petition, they would both be hung.”

“So much for the mystical qualities of the dagger,” Father O’Malley noted.

Mother McMullen raised her chin. “Not so fast, Father. Vaudreuil would have his comeuppance. First, Quebec fell to the British. The people had no reason to fight for the sake of France. They were uncared for, hungry, dispirited. Their own army ate their horses. Why fight for that? Second, when the British marched on Montreal and the city capitulated, Vaudreuil was banished to France, a country he had never even visited. He should never have gone up against the Cartier Dagger, Father.”

“Not to mention Mother d’Youville or Sarah Hanson Sabourin.”

“So true.”

The next battles for Canadians were amongst themselves.

The time was one of high anxiety for Mother McMullen and the Grey Nuns, for they were close to people on both sides of the
Patriotes
Rebellion of 1837 and 1838. The marshalling of animosity was severe, and she contended against the public displays and private ruminations of hatred.

“Let the arguments be given free expression,” she commanded, “while keeping your emotions and the harsh attitudes of your fellow citizens at bay.”

The political arguments could only have been expected in a landscape so rapidly changing. Quebec was French, yet had suffered conquest by the British.
The arrival of loyalists from the United States after the War of Independence created a separate political entity growing in size and power. Louis-Joseph Papineau, a man Mother McMullen had had the opportunity to meet on frequent occasion, captured the essence of the challenge to those in Quebec. He determined that French-Canadians, to use a term then coming into common usage, required independence from England to properly fulfill their destiny.

Mother McMullen considered Papineau quite a complicated man. She appreciated his influences, Thomas Jefferson being one. He idealized the small, independent farmer and foresaw a nation built upon an agrarian backbone. The maintenance of French common law was important so that Lower Canada could develop according to its own traditions. On these issues, Mother McMullen was sympathetic. Yet she detected contradictions in the man. He was decidedly anticlerical, no particular friend of the Holy Church. That didn’t stop him from supporting the seigneurial system, in which the Church alone dispensed farmland. A great advocate of democracy, he was less interested in the American experiment regarding capital, and so believed the power of the Church to dispense land to be an important check on capitalist speculation. The equal distribution of property among the French protected them from English expansion and from the arrival of disparate foreigners, which buffered Quebec from the new wave of capitalist venture being developed to the south. Papineau’s nationalist roots, then, were born both of his conservative underpinnings and the democratic forces of his time. When he proved, in battle, to be unstable, Mother McMullen had not been surprised.

She had been surprised, though, by the rhetoric of his proclamation, by its call to shed blood. Mother McMullen had been searching for some way for her and her order to help the situation—some manner of enlightened intervention that might shed light on the conflicts as they churned through the public mind. British business opposed the French will to remain agricultural. British expansion opposed the French desire to become a nation unto themselves. These were diametrically opposing positions, and when the Church issued an edict to its flock to engage in no activity against the political and legal authorities, priests fled for their lives from those communities where
patriote
fever ran high. Mother McMullen was certain that she had a destiny to embrace as the
outbreak of hostilities seemed increasingly inevitable, yet she found the disputes too difficult to forge any form of reconciliation. Pamphlets called upon the French to arm themselves, to count on the support of their fellow French and the Indians. The English formed what they called the Doric Club—a paramilitary group preparing for a fight. The Patriote Party formed a military wing, known as Les Fils de la Liberté. Young men placed their hands on a liberty pole and vowed to keep faith with the fatherland, to conquer or die. Rebellion was imminent.

Papineau’s proclamation included a call to behead Jews. Mother McMullen did not herself know any Jews, yet had often noted a certain discernible loathing towards them among her fellow citizens. A few lived in the city, she’d been told. From time to time, hateful things were mentioned in the papers and repeated in meetings with the bishop, but neither he nor Mother McMullen felt that such a poor reputation warranted beheadings. For all his fiery oratory, she doubted that Louis-Joseph Papineau had met a Jew either. While Jews did not acknowledge her Lord, to imagine their heads being stripped off their bodies seemed the more horrible wrong. In her studies, Mother McMullen had long since decided that grown men were capable of being infatuated with blood, of being riled by blind hatred. Killing begat more killing. Beheadings would only ignite further atrocities.

Her own Lord had been a Jew. The bishop, distraught, brought up the point himself: how could anyone instigate such an affront to the people of their Lord?

She did not trust men at war. She certainly did not trust the conflicted, unstable Papineau to behead Jews in the name of liberty, or in the name of God, or in the name of Quebec.

The fighting commenced humbly, limited to running street battles between Les Fils de la Liberté and the Doric Club, one rabid mob chasing another, only to see the tide turn as the pursuers became the pursued. Even the bloodied found the contests comic. Then fights took to the countryside, and, perhaps due to the rural setting, became brutal and deadly. The English had might on their side, the French their passionate intensity, but the death of an English courier, one Lieutenant Jack Weir, so inflamed the hearts of the
English that they swiftly grew impassioned for the confrontation as well. Their anger instigated pillaging and the burning of whole villages. Repeatedly, the poorly equipped, poorly led
patriotes
suffered devastating losses, in separate battles losing forty men, thirty in another, then seventy more, while English troops lost only a few.

Papineau himself scampered across the border to the United States.

That action demoralized the rebels. Their leadership had not supplied them with proper or sufficient arms, and, when the fight progressed badly, had fled. The rebels’ one hope, that the United States would enter the fray on their side, never came to pass.

The rebellion put down, Montrealers were obliged to learn how to live peaceably again, this time wearing the scars of combat and holding within themselves an egregious sentiment, the humiliated and the victorious nursing their hatreds both openly and amongst themselves. Men had killed one another. Men who had killed a husband shopped at the widow’s bakery. Men who had killed a son travelled the same roads as the fathers. No talk, no sermons, no quiet counsel by the Grey Nuns did much to alleviate the grievances or the open wounds.

Now, ten years on, Mother McMullen knew that she would be asking her nuns, who were primarily French, to set aside any lingering sense of injustice that they might feel and lay down their lives in the service of others. These others were not French—they were immigrants. She’d ask them to do so for the sake of no cause, only to respond to the spirit of their vows, to follow the charitable instinct of their hearts and to serve their God.

She came upon them at play, for in the spirit of their founder, Mother d’Youville, they continued to enjoy an hour of recreation each afternoon. The sisters stood to honour her presence, and quietly, still composing herself, Mother McMullen sat down and indicated that the others should join her. The nuns gathered chairs and formed a circle. One of their number, Sister Sainte-Croix, who had been with Mother Superior that morning, repeatedly dabbed the corners of her eyes.

“Sisters, today I visited the docks, having heard a most disturbing report. I elected to see for myself the conditions among certain Irish immigrants who
have, for the past while, been landing at Montreal by sea. They arrive sick, with what is known to them as ship fever. A physician today told me that the correct name is typhus. Sisters, we have an epidemic in our midst.”

The nuns remained silent. A few had already turned inward in prayer, while others waited for Mother Superior’s full assessment.

“When they arrived, it became apparent that these Irish—men of all ages, I should tell you, recruited for their labour, and many have brought their families with them, intent on returning to Ireland no more—it became apparent that they must be segregated, not admitted to our city lest the entire population perish. Sheds were constructed for their habitation. These continue to be built upon the docks, for the ships carrying the sick keep coming. This morning, at our peril, yet always in God’s hands, Sister Sainte-Croix and I entered the sheds.”

Mother McMullen paused. She had been doing fine, she thought, secure in her composure, but the rancid memory of the stench and misery inside the first shed returned to her, and she swayed with an unwelcome dizziness. She took several deep breaths, and those who now felt fearful did so as well, to prepare themselves for what might come.

“Sisters, I have today seen a sight most dire. Hundreds of men, women and children—children, also—sick, dying, huddled together among those who are long dead. The strongest constitution is unfit for the stench that emanates from their foul quarters. The atmosphere is impregnated with the odour, while one hears only the groans of those who suffer so grievously. Death resides there in its most appalling aspect. Sisters, those who thus cry aloud are strangers among us, yet their hands are outstretched—to us—for relief. Lest there be a doubt, I am speaking of a plague most contagious.”

The words were all that she could manage for a moment, for the sounds of the men and women, and of children, pleading for a moment’s respite, raising hands to beg for death, overcame her once again, and Mother McMullen fell to a momentary fit of sorrow. The nuns watched her, fretful, or kept their heads bowed. They looked up when Mother Superior cleared her throat to speak again.

“In sending you there, Sisters, I am signing your death warrants, but you are free to accept or refuse.”

As one, they accepted.

Standing before Mother McMullen, some in unison, others on their own, each woman repeated, “I am ready to serve my Lord. Accept me for this service.”

The first task they gave themselves was to drag out the dead.

Bodies were so intricately intertwined, the living among the dead, that no step could be taken in any direction without physical contact with another figure moaning and writhing in the dark, or with a stiffened corpse. Sleeping men bawled as they were pulled free from the entangled clutch of others. The very sound of their murmured complaints secured their release, and they were left to lie among the living. Those who no longer responded were pulled across a floor sodden with excrement, urine and vomit, blood and pus, and deposited outside. There, stinking and rotting, the bodies were lined into tight rows to make room for more.

Only from a safe distance did living men watch the women work.

Mother McMullen had chosen a contingent of eight nuns for the first foray into Pointe St. Charles, and they repeatedly returned inside each shed to locate more dead, to extricate them from those who suffered still, to haul them outside into the sunlight. For those of great weight, three nuns were required to heave the body, their progress difficult and minimal. When they thought they had finished their arduous task, a final tour of the premises revealed that one of the men who had been alive when they began that morning, and with whom they’d shared cogent conversation, had since died, and they pulled him outside to place him at the end of the putrid line of the dead.