SIX
The days leading up to Christmas were active and full. Clara loved the season. Loved everything about it, from the sappy commercials to the tacky parade for Père No?l through St-Rémy sponsored by Canadian Tire, to the caroling organized by Gabri. The singers moved from house to house through the snowy village filling the night air with old hymns and laughter and puffs of breath plump with song and snowflakes. Villagers invited them into their living rooms and they carried on round pianos and Christmas trees, singing and drinking brandy eggnogs and eating shortbread and smoked salmon and sweet twisty breads and all the delicacies baked in the festive ovens. The carolers sang at every home in the village over the course of a few evenings, except one. By unspoken consent, they stayed away from the dark house on the hill. The old Hadley place.
Gabri, in his Victorian cape and top hat, led the carolers. He had a beautiful voice but longed for what he couldn’t have. Each year Ruth Zardo visited the bistro as Father Christmas, chosen, Gabri said, because she didn’t have to grow a special beard. Each year Gabri would climb onto her lap and ask for the voice of a boy soprano and each year Father Christmas offered to kick him in the Christmas balls.
Every Christmas Monsieur and Madame Vachon placed the old crèche on their front lawn, complete with the baby Jesus in a clawfoot bathtub surrounded by three wise men and plastic farm animals who slowly became buried under snow and emerged unchanged in spring, another miracle, though one not shared by every villager.
Billy Williams hitched his percherons to his bright red sleigh and took boys and girls round the village and into the snow-covered hills. The children crawled under the ratty bearskin rug and cradled hot chocolate while the dignified gray giants pulled them along in a manner so calm and measured it was as though they knew their cargo to be precious. Inside the bistro parents were granted the window seats where they could sip hot cider and watch their children disappear over rue du Moulin, then they’d turn back to the warm interior with its faded fabrics, mismatched furniture and open hearths.
Clara and Peter finished their decorations, putting up splays of pine branches in their kitchen to complement the huge Scotch pine in the living room. Their home, like everyone else’s, smelled of the forest.
All the presents were wrapped and placed under the tree. Clara walked by them every morning thrilled that finally, thanks to Jane’s will, none of their gifts came from the Williamsburg dump. Finally they’d exchange gifts that didn’t need disinfecting.
Peter hung their stockings on the mantelpiece. The shortbread cookies were baked into stars and trees and snowmen and decorated with silver balls that could have been buckshot. In the living room each evening before caroling Peter would tend the fire and read his books while Clara noodled on the piano, singing carols off key. Many nights Myrna or Ruth, Gabri or Olivier would drop by for drinks or an easy dinner.
Then, before they knew it, it was Christmas Eve and they were all off to émilie’s for her réveillon party. But first, midnight service at St Thomas’s church.
‘Silent night, holy night,’ the congregation sang, with more gusto than talent. It actually sounded slightly like the old sea shanty, ‘What shall we do with the drunken Sailor’. Gabri’s beautiful tenor naturally led them, or at least made it clear they were wandering in a musical wilderness, or lost at sea. Except one. From the back of the wooden chapel came a voice of such exquisite clarity it staggered even Gabri. The child’s voice swooped out of the pew and mingled with the meandering voices of the congregation and hovered around the holly and pine boughs the Anglican Church Women had placed all over so that the worshippers had the impression they were not in a church at all, but a forest. Bare maple limbs had been attached to the rafters by Billy Williams, and the ACW, led by Mother, had asked him to twine small white lights loosely about the branches. The effect was of the heavens sparkling above the small gathering of faithful. The church was filled with greenery and light.
‘Green is the heart chakra,’ Mother had explained.
‘I’m sure the Bishop will be pleased,’ Kaye said.
On Christmas Eve St Thomas’s was also filled with families, children excited and exhausted, elderly men and women who’d come to this place all their lives and sat in the same pew and worshipped the same God and baptized and married and buried those they loved. Some they never got to bury, but instead immortalized in the small stained glass window placed to get the morning, the youngest, light. They marched now in warm yellows and blues and greens, for ever perfect and petrified in the Great War. Etched below the brilliant boys were their names and the words ‘They Were Our Children’.
This night the church was full of Anglicans and Catholics and Jews and non-believers and people who believed in something undefined and unrestricted to a church. They came because St Thomas’s on Christmas Eve was full of greenery and light.
But, unexpectedly, this Christmas it was also full of the most beautiful singing.
‘All is calm,’ the voice sang, rescuing the sinking congregation. Clara turned, trying to find the child. Many were also craning to see who was leading them. Even Gabri was forced to relinquish his place in the unexpected and not totally welcome presence of the divine. It was as though an angel, as Yeats would have it, became weary of the whimpering dead and chose this lively company.
Clara suddenly had a perfect view.
There at the back stood CC de Poitiers wearing a fluffy white sweater made of either cashmere or kittens. Beside her was her husband, florid and mute. And beside him an enormous child was wearing a sleeveless sundress of the brightest pink. Her underarms bulged and flopped and the rolls of her waist made the skintight dress look like a melting strawberry ice cream. It was grotesque.
But her face was beautiful. Clara had seen this child before, but only from a distance and only with a sullen unhappy face. But now that face was tilted toward the glowing rafters and held a look Clara knew to be bliss.
‘All is bright.’ Crie’s exquisite voice played in the rafters with the lights then slipped under the door of the old chapel and danced with the gently falling snowflakes and parked cars and bare maples. The words of the old carol glided across the frozen pond and nested in the Christmas trees and seeped into every happy home in Three Pines.
After the service the minister hurried out, late for Christmas Eve celebrations in nearby Cleghorn Halt.
‘Joyeux No?l,’ said Peter to Gabri as they gathered on the steps outside the church for the short stroll across the village to émilie’s house. ‘What a beautiful night.’
‘And what a beautiful service,’ said Clara, coming up beside Peter. ‘Can you believe that child’s voice?’
‘Not bad,’ admitted Gabri.
‘Not bad?’ Mother Bea oscillated up to them, Kaye on her arm like a muff and émilie on her other side. ‘She was unbelievable. I’ve never heard such a voice, have you?’
‘I need a drink,’ said Kaye. ‘When’re we leaving?’
‘Right now,’ Em assured her.
‘Olivier’s getting the food from the bistro,’ said Gabri. ‘We made a poached salmon.’
‘Will you marry me?’ asked Myrna.
‘I bet you ask all the girls,’ said Gabri.
‘You’re the first,’ admitted Myrna and laughed. But her laughter was cut short.
‘You’re a stupid, stupid girl,’ a voice hissed from the other side of the church. Everyone froze, surprised to stillness by the words that cut through the crisp night air. ‘Everyone was staring at you. You humiliated me.’
It was CC’s voice. There was a side door to the church and a path that was a short cut to de Moulin and the old Hadley house. CC must be there, they realized, standing in the shadow of the church.
‘They were laughing at you, you know. Deep and crisp and even,’ CC sang in a mocking voice, off key and childish. ‘And your clothes. Are you sick? I think you’re mentally unstable.’
‘Now CC,’ came a man’s voice so meek and weak it barely penetrated the flurries.
‘She’s your daughter. Look at her. Fat and ugly and lazy. Like you. Are you crazy, Crie? Is that it? Is it? Is it?’
The crowd was frozen in place as though hiding from a monster, silently pleading, please, please, someone stop her. Someone else.
‘And you’ve opened your Christmas gift, you selfish child.’
‘But you told me I—’ came the tiny response.
‘Me, me, me. That’s all I hear from you. And have you even thanked me?’
‘Thank you for the chocolates, Mommy.’ The voice and the girl were so diminished as to be almost non-existent.
‘Too late. It doesn’t count if I have to beg.’ The end of the sentence was barely audible as CC clicked down the path as though walking on claws.
The congregation stood speechless. Beside Clara Gabri started humming, low and slow, then, barely audible, came the words to the old carol: ‘Sorr’wing, sighing, bleeding, dying. Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.’
They’d evaded the monster. Instead, it had devoured a frightened child.