The Orphanage Page 4

  A towel rack, a shelf for a basin of water, a drawer, a tiny door right at the bottom, with some storage space behind it.

  The vanity, the two-burner stove, the huge pot, all on top of each other— how could a child ever have known what was bubbling away in there?

  The vanity sat in the middle of the dormitory.

  Space had been cleared on both sides of it, opposite the nuns’ cells at the back. The pot was much too big for one burner. It covered both burners at once, and even a little more.

  Down the middle of the stove and its two burners, the construction was secure enough. But along the other axis, it was a different matter altogether: more than half the pot tipped dangerously toward the front or back of the stove.

  Talk about something being balanced precariously! Especially when there were fifty children in the dormitory.

  Going to bed or getting up. Running in all directions, even though we weren’t allowed to. Running to the bathroom, to get something to drink, to wash, to brush our teeth. In short, it was chaotic.

  The very floor would shake. Fifty children can get even a concrete floor to shake!

  In other words, whenever the floor shook, we could see the huge pot rocking back and forth. I’m not exaggerating when I say we could see it rocking.

  Back and forth.

  There was no danger of it spilling over the sides of the vanity: that was the stable axis, in line with the stove’s burners. And the towel rack behind it would probably have put up enough resistance.

  But toward the front, it was a worrying sight.

  What would happen if the pot lurched forward? The question had been eating away at me ever since I saw the set-up.

  I had seen the pot tip over a hundred times in my head.

  One hundred times I had imagined the brown mixture come pouring out of the pot

  — I reckoned the mixture had to be the same colour as the steam it gave off. One hundred times I had shuddered at the thought.

  Which is why I always kept a calm, respectful distance between myself and the devil’s cauldron. Not understanding why many of the other children appeared oblivious to the danger, coming within inches of the vanity as they ran past, walked backwards, pushed each other.

  What was bound to happen finally happened.

  But first, for the rest to make sense, everything has to be put in context.

  The refectory was scrubbed from top to bottom once a week. The floor was mopped at night, after our usual bedtime.

  On those nights, only half the children went to bed. The other twenty-five— we took turns —would spend an hour cleaning the refectory.

  We pushed the tables and benches to one side. The children would then stand in line and get down on their knees to scrub, each holding their own brush.

  We scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed, then mopped the floor. We shuffled back like that, until half the refectory had been cleaned.

  We pushed the tables and benches back onto the clean side. We washed the other half. We pushed the tables and benches back to where they belonged. Then we went to bed.

  That is what the other children did. Things weren’t the same for me because of my special status.

  I acted as an assistant to the nuns, like in the classroom.

  And you wouldn’t catch the nuns’ assistant down on his hands and knees scrubbing a floor. Oh no, not on your life!

  The assistant stood with the nuns, waiting to be asked to do this or that.

  Perhaps they needed more floor mops, perhaps the water needed changing, or a brush had to be replaced. That night it was:

  — Richard, go get the floor soap.

  — Where is the floor soap, Mother?

  — In the closet at the bottom of the vanity in the dormitory.

  — You mean the small desk underneath the big pot in the middle of the dormitory?

  — Yes, in the closet space at the bottom of that desk. Do not turn on the lights and do not make a sound or you will wake the children who are asleep.

  Scared to death, I walked toward what I sensed was my fate. I walked up to the gates of hell, crouched down, and grabbed hold of the porcelain knob to open the door.

  I pulled: nothing happened.

  I pulled harder: still nothing. The door was locked, I decided.

  I went back to the nun.

  — It can’t be—it doesn’t have a lock!

  — But I pulled really hard and the door didn’t open.

  — Richard, stop acting like a child. Just go get the floor soap, would you?

  The nun was right: there was no lock.

  It was the closing mechanism that made the vanity door hard to open. A metal rod with a ball on the end was attached to the inside of the door. There was a metal clip on the inside of the vanity. When you opened the door, both parts of the clip opened too and freed the metal ball.

  In the other direction, the ball first forced the clip to open, then the clip closed over the metal rod: the door was closed.

  You no doubt recognize a fixture that can still be found on most antiques and old kitchen closet doors today. You can’t apply gradual pressure to open them. You have to pull sharply on the knob or handle. You close them sharply too.

  Back to the door at the gates of hell.

  First I gave gradual pressure a try. No luck: the door didn’t budge an inch.

  Then I knew what I had to do: open the doors with a sharp tug. But wouldn’t that risk bringing the cooking pot crashing down? Especially since it could only fall forward, right on top of me.

  I looked at the options available to me. I turned away from the vanity, ready to start the 100-metre dash.

  My right hand behind my back, I grabbed hold of the knob. I would give it a sharp pull and start running at the same time. If nothing happened, I would be guilty only of being too careful. If the pot fell, I would be out of harm’s reach.

  Wasn’t that a great plan?

  Its only flaw was that it didn’t work.

  I crouched down, ready to break into a sprint. My right hand behind my back, I grabbed the knob.

  One, two, three: go! I gave it a tug and took off. My right foot, the foot I was planning to explode off, slipped on the floor and I fell flat on my face.

  It’s amazing how time ground to a halt, everything that had time to come into my head. Flat on my face at the foot of the vanity, I told myself that if I was out of luck the pot had already begun to fall toward me.

  I flung myself onto my back. And I saw it. In the pale glow of the night lights, I saw it.

  I saw the pot already halfway down. I saw the strange liquid spilling out of it. Next came the pain. Indescribable pain.

  The nun had told me not to make any noise so as not to wake up the children.

  But I made such a racket! I picked myself up, roaring with all my strength. Out of the dormitory and into the central hallway.

  I cried and I howled, jumping up and down on the spot.

  What happened next might be hard to believe, but I swear it’s the truth.

  The nuns took me to the bathroom. They sprayed me with cold water and washed me. I needed a good wash since who knows what had been boiling in the pot. By this stage, I was passive and silent.

  I must have fainted since the next second I was lying in my bed. Wrapped up so tightly in the covers that I couldn’t move at all.

  With all the lights on, it was as bright as daylight. Space had been cleared around my bed. My forty-nine comrades were on their knees in a circle, and one nun said:

  — Pray for Richard who has just had a serious accident.

  — Hail Mary, full of grace, the children chorused.

  I prayed with them.

  There was no arguing with Mother Superior. If she told you to pray, you prayed.

  The praying went on for a while. Until around midnight, I’d say. Until the orphanage chaplain, Abbot Larouche, came back from a parish somewhere in the diocese.

  Apparently I hadn’t woken up only my floor. The chaplain found t
he whole orphanage in an uproar.

  The nuns must have come up with some convoluted excuse or other. I suppose they must have felt guilty.

  Guilty of what? I’ll leave that up to you.

  What I do know is that I saw the chaplain appear out of nowhere.

  Rushing through the crowd, he took me in his arms. He ran through the orphanage and out to his car. He set me down on the back seat. And drove straight to the emergency room at the hospital in Chicoutimi.

  What happened next is rather hazy.

  Days followed nights, I imagine. I was covered from head to toe in bandages. Third-degree burns over half my body, second-degree burns everywhere else.

  Later they told me it had been a close call, I was lucky to still be alive.

  At the beginning, whenever they changed my bandages I couldn’t feel a thing. It was almost as though they were doing it to someone else.

  But later, when I was back to my usual self and my wounds had started to heal, I dreaded having to get my bandages changed almost every day.

  The pain was on top of a fear of scarring: would I be disfigured for life?

  Phew! My face and hands had only second-degree burns, which I was assured— and which I was later able to prove for myself —would leave no trace.

  As for the rest of my body, they explained the skin that developed as I grew older would be perfectly normal. Between the age of seven and fifteen I was able to follow the progress of my scars as they gradually retreated.

  In fact, they never did get any smaller. I was the one that grew.

  All that remains is for me to tell you how my father reacted. At least, how people told me he reacted.

  And what people continued to say for years thereafter, proudly, throughout the family.

  In 1962 when all of this happened, my father was working on the construction site at Manic 5, the hydroelectric dam that is still the pride of Quebec today. Especially anyone who helped build it.

  You should have heard my father for the rest of his life— the way he told it, he had built the whole thing himself!

  At any rate, word reached my father at the Manic-5 site.

  — Hurry, Monsieur Bergeron. One of your sons is dying in the Chicoutimi Hospital.

  My father was there in a flash.

  He must have taken the time to ask what was going on, though. Because the first visit he made wasn’t to the hospital, but to the orphanage.

  Imagine the scene. My father in the entrance hall. The nuns bowing and fawning all over him.

  — Monsieur Bergeron, how dreadful! What a tragedy!

  — That’s enough, ladies. May I speak with Mother Superior?

  Mother Superior was tiny, barely five feet tall, no doubt less than a hundred pounds. She rushed over like a little mouse, all aflutter, looking suitably shaken, which was only right and proper, of course, when meeting the father of the poor child that had just been burned from head to toe.

  — Monsieur Bergeron—

  She didn’t get another word out.

  My father had already punched her right in the face. She collapsed to the floor. A broken jaw and a concussion, they told me later. Which meant Mother Superior ended up in the hospital too, along with me.

  They also said the whole thing was settled before it ever got to court: you don’t sue us for burning your son and we won’t sue you for flattening Mother Superior.

  It sounds plausible enough because my father never heard another word about his unexpected visit to the orphanage.

  It was only after that that my father apparently came to my bedside.

  I say “apparently” because I didn’t notice a thing. In fact, I can’t remember anything at all about my first days in the hospital. Or maybe even my first weeks there.

  I have two children of my own. A boy and a girl.

  Their seventh birthdays were both very important to me.

  They were so small, so beautiful when they were seven. So carefree and fragile, too, as children should be.

  And both times I said to myself,

  — Did I really go through all that at their age?

  Today as I write these lines I can hardly believe it. I’m almost glad to still have the scars. To never forget.

  To know it wasn’t all a dream.

  CONVALESCENCE

  I must have spent something like three months in the hospital.

  On the fortieth day— I know it was the fortieth because the adults wrote it down and told me later—I decided to get out of bed. But I don’t need anyone to remind what had happened then.

  Bang! I landed on the floor. The end of the world!

  — I’ll never walk again, just like Maman! I cried.

  The nurses came running.

  — Don’t worry, Richard. You’ll be up and running as much as you like. You just need us to help you.

  The nurses were right. I walked, ran, and jumped so much that my last month in the hospital was like one long party.

  Apart from when my bandages had to be changed, of course.

  On the children’s floor of a huge hospital, there is no shortage of children! Most arrive in a terrible mess, but in no time at all— as was the case for me—they’re up for all kinds of games.

  Some leave, others come in. The turnover was so high that I ended up teaching the others how to play since I’d been there so long.

  The best game of all was also the simplest: jumping up and down on the beds. The nurses caught me and the other boys at it ten times. Once in so-and-so’s bedroom, then someone else’s.

  They decided they had had enough of me wreaking havoc in their hospital. I was sent somewhere else to convalesce.

  My convalescence was spent at my grandmother’s.

  Two months of bliss.

  You have had enough clues by now to have guessed there was something special between me and my grandmother. After those two months, our bond would last forever.

  Was she a better grandmother than all the rest? I don’t think so. I can tell you that when she had someone in her sights then he had better look out!

  Her husband, my grandfather, for example. He made the mistake of cheating on her, more than once, on business trips to Quebec City and Montreal.

  He was really something, Médéric Tibé Bergeron. The number one wood supplier to the paper mills in all of the Lac-Saint-Jean area.

  He employed up to three hundred lumberjacks at once, split into four or five camps, in the middle of Parc des Laurentides and wherever else the paper companies had acquired logging rights from the government.

  He also owned one of the nicest farms in Hébertville-Station, with up to one hundred draft horses.

  You should have seen the looks on the faces of the old men in Saint-Cœur-de-Marie, L’Ascension, Métabetchouan, and any other village you care to name around the lake when they heard I was Tibé Bergeron’s grandson. They had all worked for him. They couldn’t stop talking about him.

  Because times had been hard in the bush camps of the 1930s and ’40s. And they didn’t come much tougher than Tibé.

  He had been hard on his men and his horses.

  The men of L’Ascension would tell how six of them had been thrown outside in their underwear— through a camp window—because they refused to go and cut trees when it was minus forty-five.

  And having seen these men two or three decades later, I can swear that real lumberjacks had been thrown out the window. The men who told me these stories weren’t bitter, just full of admiration for my grandfather.

  Others told me how a horse had been killed, stuck in deep snow and not able to move forward with its heavy load of logs.

  — A horse that can’t do its job deserves to die!

  It was killed on the spot, flogged to death by Tibé Bergeron with the chains he used to fasten the logs.

  With fifty horrified men looking on.

  I should point out that I’m not at all sure either of these stories is true. Does a myth even need to be?

  At any rate, Tib
é met his Waterloo in the shape of his own wife when she found out he had been cheating on her.

  She took her revenge all right, especially after the heart attack that left him half-paralyzed.

  I was on my grandmother’s side. I would annoy my grandfather however I could. By changing the channel when he was watching TV, by knocking against the back of his rocking chair, or by stealing his fork when we were eating.

  Grand-papa would get worked up and insult me as best his laborious speech would allow. Grand-maman wasn’t long in responding:

  — Shut up, you old fool!

  Not nice, not nice at all.

  With some people, affinity comes naturally. I’d go as far as to say it’s an animal instinct.

  I may have been calculating with the nuns and plenty of others, but with Grand-maman I let myself go.

  Give and take is nonetheless at the heart of all human relations. Love and respect and you will be loved and respected. Give and you will receive. How many people ruin their lives because they never understand these basic truths?

  When I was a teenager, for as long as Grand-maman lived in her home in Alma, I went to see her every day.

  We played cards, I went shopping for her, we watched television. When she moved into the home in Saint-Cœur-de-Marie, I had to make do with seeing her just once a week. Out there and home again on the bus every Saturday without fail.

  My friends would laugh:

  — Richard can’t come Saturday afternoons. He’s off to visit grandma!