As Long as the Rivers Flow (6 page)

His happiness and sense of fulfilment would have been complete were it not for an obsession that disturbed him greatly—as long as he could remember, he had been attracted by prepubescent girls. As an adolescent at his classical college, he did not find his feelings unnatural. He joined in the laughter as his friends repeated
the smutty stories they heard their older brothers tell when they went home on weekends.

But when he was in his early twenties at the seminary, he found he could not stop himself from fantasizing about little girls, and only about little girls. He sensed that his feelings were unnatural and sought the advice of an older priest, his confessor.

“My son,” the priest asked him, “have you ever done anything improper with a little girl?”

“Of course not, Father.”

“I would not worry too much. You are probably just going through a phase in your life that you will outgrow. You should pray for strength to resist your weakness, and remember, never, ever, act out your fantasies.”

However, despite much fervent praying, the seminarian’s obsession became stronger, and incidents occurred, all of which were hushed up. In one instance, the parents of an eight-year-old girl walked into the vestry of their church to find him fondling their daughter who was sitting partially undressed on his knee.

The girl’s mother swept the girl up in her arms and the father punched and kicked the seminarian as he fled the room.

“Espèce de maudit salaud!
Don’t think that because you’re a member of the Church you can do such things to a little girl! I’m going straight to the police.
Tabarouette!
”

The police, however, were reluctant to lay charges against a future member of the clergy and asked the bishop to smooth matters over.

The bishop received the angry parents at his official residence.

“I have asked you here this morning,” the bishop said, “because I want to express the remorse of the Church for the actions of the young man. I understand your anger and I must tell you I would feel the same way if I was in your shoes. However, I am a bishop
and must think of the well-being of the Church. If you press charges, its reputation would be damaged. As good Catholics, you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

When the parents grudgingly nodded their concurrence, the bishop quickly told them to condemn the sin and pray for the sinner.

“Leave the matter in my hands,” he told them. “I promise you that that young man will never do such a thing again. You can be certain that the Good Lord himself would want it dealt with in this way.”

The parents nervously glanced at Pope Pius XI smiling beneficently at them from a framed photograph hanging on the wall and quietly left the premises.

Since the seminarian was so widely read, so ardent in his faith, so passionate about the Church, its music and its history and such a good candidate in every other way, the bishop allowed him to be ordained when the time came. But to ensure he would cause no future scandal, he sent him to an Indian residential school in northern Ontario, where presumably he could do no harm, to cater to the spiritual and moral needs of the children and teaching staff, all of whom were nuns.

Father Antoine was so pleased at escaping arrest and being allowed to accept his calling, he embraced with great energy his new duties—at least for a while. In his daily routine, he celebrated Holy Eucharist, led prayers, delivered sermons, heard confessions and taught catechism to the children, preparing them to take their first communion and, later, for their confirmation. In his free time, he read the books from his library that he had brought with him from home.

Every Saturday, alone in his room, he listened to
Hockey Night in Canada
, broadcast on the CBC Northern Service from the Forum in Montreal where the home team, with their new generation of
superstars such as Maurice “Rocket” Richard, Toe Blake and Elmer Lach, played their home games.

But as the years passed, and as the 1940s became the 1950s, his enthusiasm waned. Some nights he would turn from the book he was reading to think of the life he could have had as a priest in a small Quebec village if he had not been found out. He would imagine himself knocking on the door of a farmhouse on a cool, dark, fall evening. Supper would be over but the family of twelve would not yet have gone to bed. The children would be playing cards on the kitchen table, the mother and her eldest daughter would be drying the dishes, and the father would be listening to the latest agricultural news on the radio.

A child would answer the door and would cry out in pleasure on seeing him. “Mama, papa,
c’est monsieur le cure! Venez vite! Venez vite!
”

Mama and papa would hurry to the door.
“Entrez, s’il vous plaît. Entrez. Quel plaisir de vous voir. Quel honneur vous nous faites de votre visite.”

As they ushered him into their modest home, repeating over and over how honoured they were by his visit, mama would ask him to sit in the parlour but he would say “No, no, no, I would love to join the family in the kitchen. Don’t forget, I am a son of the land and know the best place to be in a farmhouse.”

He would enter the kitchen and pull up a chair to the table, the cards would be quickly cleared away, the radio switched off, and mama would soon be serving him a cup of freshly brewed coffee and a piece of homemade
tarte au sucre
. He would joke, laugh, gossip and dispense wise counsel throughout the evening as the fire in the big cookstove roared, as grandpapa puffed on his pipe on a nearby rocking chair and chuckled, and as the family dog stretched out in comfort at his feet.

The scene would shift and Father Antoine would be celebrating midnight mass on Christmas Eve before a standing-room-only crowd of the faithful who had defied the arctic temperatures and snowdrifts to come to church. The mood of the villagers would be joyful and passionately spiritual, for Christ the Saviour was born at midnight and they had gathered together, missals in hand and wearing rosaries, just as their ancestors had over the centuries in France and in Quebec, to receive Holy Communion, to pray, and to sing the traditional carols.

Closing his eyes, Father Antoine would hear once again the words of the
Huron Carol
, composed by the great Jesuit missionary and martyr Saint Jean de Brébeuf, who had been burned at the stake by the Iroquois with a necklace of red-hot hatchets around his neck in the early years of New France. It was his favourite hymn and he never failed to be inspired by its call to Christians “to take heart, for the Devil’s work was done.”

Outside the door to the church there would be a Christmas tree decorated with holly, wreaths and coloured lights. Inside, there would be a Nativity scene of a miniature village in ancient Palestine, with Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus surrounded by the Three Wise Men and shepherds with their sheep and lambs. A sweet smell of incense and flowers would fill the church, rows of candles would be blazing on each side of the sanctuary and the bells would be ringing.

And he, Father Lionel Antoine, beloved shepherd of his parish, would be there, tending his flock on one of the most important and
joyous celebrations of the French-Canadian religious calendar year.

Then the desolate sound of the wind, blowing day and night out of nowhere over the foul-smelling, salt-water mud flats separating the school from James Bay, would bring the priest back to earth. Loneliness would engulf him, and he would put down his book, rise from his chair, and begin wandering aimlessly through the deserted halls. As he passed the dormitories, he would hear the muffled sobs of some frightened, homesick student and would feel a sense of solidarity mixed with envy. Both of them, student and priest, he could not help thinking, were prisoners in exile from their homes serving out harsh sentences. But the child would be free to return home after ten or twelve years while he was condemned to remain in his prison until he retired.

As the years went by, Father Antoine grew bitter, and he shut himself up in his bedroom and adjoining office, emerging only to say mass and teach catechism. He let himself go to seed, bathing infrequently, allowing an unkempt beard to take root on his face and wearing the same clothes for weeks at a time. He gave up reading and even stopped listening to
Hockey Night in Canada
on the radio, even though the Montreal Canadians year after year were now winning the Stanley Cup.

These changes did not go unnoticed by the nuns. In an effort to cheer him up, they dipped into the budget allocated for the children’s food and sent away for expensive, high-quality meats, butter and vegetables. Soon they were preparing, and anxiously delivering to his office, meals of roast beef covered in rich gravy, meat pies and tomato sauce, homemade bread lathered in butter, mashed, roast, and French-fried potatoes, baked beans and bacon, hot, heavily buttered toast, apple pie with whipped cream, roast chicken and braised Canada goose.

Naturally, with such a rich diet, the good Father became fat. When he became fat, he became remorseful, aware that in the eyes of the Church, gluttony was a venial sin only, but still, something to be ashamed of. He felt even worse when he went one day into the dining hall where the students were eating their evening meal. What a stink. What flies and cockroaches. What minuscule portions. What unappetizing dishes of lumpy mashed potatoes, greased bread, cornstarch pudding and powdered milk. The food was not fit to eat by any civilized being.

For a few moments, he felt a twinge of conscience—what the nuns gave him was so much better. He soon got over it, however, when he remembered that at their homes back on reserve, the children subsisted on a diet of game, lard, bannock and tea—fare, in his opinion, that was vastly inferior to what they received at the school.

The day came, almost inevitably, when he could no longer control himself and he molested a little girl. At first he was afraid because she fled his office in hysterics and told the nuns that he had hurt her. But no one believed her and he realized that he was free to do anything he wanted without fear of sanction. The Indian girls were under his control, and the nuns, even if they were to take the word of a child over his, would never think of calling the police or reporting him to his superiors. He was after all, a priest, and they had been trained to obey priests without question. In any case, the residential school was far from Quebec and if word was to trickle out to his superiors, the worst that would happen, he was now convinced, would be that he would be transferred to another residential school where he could carry on as before.

He thus informed the nuns that in his village,
le curé
had played a big role, when he was a boy, in helping him deepen and enrich his religious sensibilities. He wanted to do the same for a select group
of Indian girls because, he said, more needed to be done to encourage religious vocations for women.

“I will pick them out myself,” he said. “All you have to do is to bring them to me in my office and I will provide them with private spiritual guidance.”

Pleased to see him show interest in his work, the nuns followed his instructions conscientiously and, over the years, sent a steady stream of hand-picked little girls to his office where, after passionately and sincerely professing his fatherly love to each in turn, he sexually assaulted them. Only, he told himself, his actions did not really constitute assault since he was always gentle. He was not, he convinced himself, an ogre, even if his little visitors sometimes cried. He was certainly not a pedophile, since in his way of thinking, pedophiles preyed on little boys and not on little girls.

To the delight of the nuns, Father Antoine emerged from his depression and began to smile again. He had, they concluded, finally adjusted to life at the school and found a reason for living.

One day early in the new year, Sister Angelica told Martha that Father Antoine wanted to see her. The nun knew why, for she had been among the little girls he had summoned to his office when she was a student at the school. At the time, she had accepted what he did to her passively, and being gullible by nature, had believed him when he told her that he loved her. Even though the priest had dropped her when she became a teenager, she remained fiercely loyal and passionately attached to him. She had never told anyone, not even the other nuns, about what took place behind his closed door.

In her opinion, Father Antoine had caused her no lasting harm and so she did not intend to warn Martha about what lay in store for her. Besides, the priest’s attentions, she had come to believe, had constituted a sort of test or rite of passage that you had to go through
before you could go on to greater things in life. She wondered, however, if Martha would be up to the challenge.

Martha, oblivious to what awaited her, dutifully made her way to Father Antoine’s office along a corridor lined with reproductions of paintings of Jesus suffering on the cross, and knocked on the door.

“Entrez!
Come in!”

Martha turned the handle and pushed open the door. Inside was a desk so enormous she could not see over it, and to one side a small table on top of which were a half-empty glass filled with what looked like red water, several slices of thickly buttered bread and a half-finished plate of meat and potatoes. On the wall behind the desk was a large black-and-white photograph of a group of people, a smiling young priest in the middle, standing in front of a big house. Shelves crammed with books covered the other walls. And sitting in front of the table eating his dinner was Father Antoine himself.

The priest put down his knife and fork, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and examined the little girl carefully from head to foot. Smiling gently, he motioned for her to close the door and come to him.

“Ma
petite fille
, you are so timid. But you are not here because you did anything wrong. You will not be punished. I have been watching you ever since you arrived and know you had a hard time at the beginning. You have coped well and seem to have a religious nature. I spoke to Sister Angelica who told me she has observed the same thing in you. I want to spend some time with you, and to help you in your spiritual growth.