Myrna held her coffee mug and listened. She knew he wasn’t asking her anything. Not yet.
“Families at that time routinely had ten, twelve, even twenty children. My own wife comes from a family of twelve children, and that was a generation on. In a small village, in the country, in the 1920s? It would have been their sacred duty to have children. And any couple that failed to conceive would be shunned. Considered unblessed. Even, perhaps, evil.”
Myrna nodded. This attitude no longer existed in Québec, but it had until fairly recently. Well within living memory. Until the Quiet Revolution gave women back their bodies and Quebeckers back their lives. It invited the Church to leave the womb and restrict itself to the altar. It almost worked.
But in a farming community, in the twenties and thirties? Gamache was right. Every year that passed without children, the Ouellets would be more and more ostracized. Viewed with either pity or suspicion. Shunned, as though their childless state was communicable and would curse them all. People, animals, land. All would become infertile, barren. Because of one young couple.
“They’d have been desperate,” said Gamache. “Marie-Harriette describes spending most of her days in the village church, praying. Going to confession. Doing penance. And then, finally, eight years on, she made the long journey to Montréal. It would have been a horrendous trip for a woman alone, from the Montérégie area all the way into Montréal. And then this farmer’s wife, who’d never been outside her village, walked from the train station all the way to Saint Joseph’s Oratory. That alone would’ve taken her most of a day.”
As he spoke, he watched Myrna. She’d stopped sipping her coffee. Her brownie sat on her plate, half eaten. She listened, wholly and completely. Even Henri, at Gamache’s feet, seemed to listen, his satellite ears turned to his master’s voice.
“It was May of 1936,” he said. “Do you know why she went to the Oratoire Saint-Joseph?”
“Brother André?” Myrna asked. “Was he still alive?”
“Barely. He was ninety years old and very ill. But he continued to see people. They came from all over the world by then,” said Gamache. “Have you been to the Oratory?”
“Yes,” said Myrna.
It was an extraordinary sight, the great dome, illuminated at night, visible from much of Montréal. The designers had created a long, wide pedestrian boulevard that ran from the street straight to the front door. Except that the church had been built on the side of the mountain. And the only way in was up. Up, up the many stone stairs. Ninety-nine of them.
And once inside? The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with crutches and canes. Left because they were no longer needed.
Thousands of weak and crippled pilgrims had dragged themselves up those stone steps into the presence of the tiny old man. And Brother André had healed them.
He was ninety years old when Marie-Harriette Ouellet made her pilgrimage, and walking off the end of his life. It would be understandable if he conserved what strength he had left. But the wizened little man in the simple black robes continued to heal others while growing weaker himself.
Marie-Harriette Ouellet had traveled alone from her small farm to beg the saint for a miracle.
Gamache spoke without need of his notes. What happened next was not easily forgotten.
“Saint Joseph’s Oratory wasn’t what it is today. There was a church there, and a long promenade and stairs, but the dome wasn’t completed. Now it’s overrun with tourists, but back then almost everyone who visited was a pilgrim. The sick, the dying, the crippled, desperate for help. Marie-Harriette joined them.”
He paused and took a deep breath. Myrna, who’d been looking into the dying fire, met his eyes. She knew what almost certainly came next.
“At the gate, the foot of the long pedestrian boulevard, she dropped to her knees and said the first of the Hail Marys,” said Gamache.
His voice was deep and warm, but neutral. There was no need to infuse his words with his own feelings.
The images came alive as he spoke. Both he and Myrna could see the young woman. Young by their standards, elderly by the judgment of her time.
Twenty-six-year-old Marie-Harriette, dropped to her knees.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, she prayed. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
Into the quiet loft, Armand Gamache spoke the familiar prayer.
“All night she crawled on her knees along the promenade, stopping to say the Hail Mary at every step,” said Gamache. “At the bottom of the stairs Marie-Harriette didn’t hesitate. She headed up them, her bloody knees staining her best dress.”
It must have looked, thought Myrna, like menstruation. Blood staining a woman’s dress. As she prayed for children.
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.