“Paddy, look out yonder!”Ben takes charge, dispatching Paddy and the Tremaine brothers to help round up the crew of the local lifeboat. The craft sets out for the overturned vessel, upon which balances a desperate man.
Paddy looked and uttered an exclamation:
“Cricky, Ben!” he cried, “it’s a boat, a catboat, I guess, and what — "
He said no more, but ran with a quick, instinctive movement down to the water’s edge. “It’s bottom upward!” he cried, “that’s what it is.”
“By Jingo!” was all Ben said, as he strode after his friend. By mutual consent, they seemed to ignore the city boys, who could not be expected to know anything of such an emergency.
"What I have to tell you first is deeply shocking, especially to our Catholic instincts. Boys, he went out there into those waves with the deliberate purpose of destroying himself.”But, of course, the boys' good work helped save the wealthy man from eternal damnation.
Exclamations of horror broke from the lads. The Tremaines particularly, in their sturdy and enlightened Catholicity, felt loathing of that capital crime, that unpardonable sin, which done deliberately, makes even the mercy of a Redeeming God unavailable.
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| from The World's Columbian Catholic Congresses and Educational Exhibit (Chicago: J.S. Hyland & Co., 1893) |
“God bless you and do, Father,” cried an old woman, from whose aged eyes tears were streaming.I ask again, has anyone out there read Anna T. Sadlier? Is this typical of her novels?
Every one waited respectfully. Even Protestants or other outsiders who had no hold whatever upon Christianity regarded him curiously. They drew a kind of comfort from the mysterious power which, as it was quietly whispered around, he was about to exert over that human soul which might be even then slipping from its bonds and losing its hold upon earthly life. The priest had with him the stole which he had but lately worn when administering the Sacraments to a dying person in the calm obscurity of a little inland village. He put this about his neck and knelt a moment in prayer, and the Catholics — of whom there were many present — knelt likewise, while others raised their hats or bent the knee, sympathetically. Fred and Harry afterward declared that they had never prayed so hard in their lives as then. After that slight pause the priest arose and said in a clear, distinct voice:
“By the power which the Church confers upon her ministers, the power derived from Christ, I am about to give this man conditional absolution.’’
There was a dead silence, broken only by a giant wave breaking upon the shore. The priest raised his hand and every one present, forgetting all controversial differences, was impressed by the tremendous power of the act.
“I absolve you,” he said in Latin, “from all sins, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” To which he added: “May the Almighty God have mercy on you and forgive you your sins and bring you to life everlasting. Amen.”
A kind of peace and quietness fell over the scene with the performance of that holy act. Women and even strong men, overcome by the solemnity of the occasion, wept audibly, while the priest, sinking once more upon his knees, prayed aloud and begged the people to pray for the rescue of the unhappy being thus buffeted by the waves or for the salvation of his soul. The air seemed to vibrate with those burning words of supplication wherein people of all creeds or of none felt impelled to join. It used to be said long afterwards in the village that the whole incident was better than twenty sermons and it brought back more than one stray sheep to the fold. It showed the relative values, the little space which divides time from eternity and made every one realize, with a strange new force, the almost infinite power of the priesthood.
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| Pussy Black-Face Marshall Saunders Boston: Page, 1913 |
They sidle up to me with a conspiratorial air and murmur into my ear the name of some author or book, all this in the same tone of someone asking for a condom or a suppository in a drug store. Others are more evasive still; they shower me with meaningful glances and ask me to recommend "something a little out of the ordinary" or "something with a kick to it."Jodoin quickly comes to resent the extra work involved in retrieving volumes from the sanctum sanctorum, recognizing most aren't at all interested in liberty and freedom of thought: "If these jokers are looking for an aphrodisiac, they can find more effective ones."
* Researching this piece, I was amused to discover that Georges Sagehomme's Répertoire alphabétique de plus de 7000 auteurs avec leurs ouvrages au nombre de 32000 (romans et pièces de théâtre) qualifiés quant à leur valeur morale (1931), was revised nine times; the last – published twenty-nine years after his death – is Répertoire alphabétique de 16700 auteurs 70000 romans et pièces de théâtre cotés au point de vue moral.Trivia: There is an actual St-Joachim, Quebec, located roughly thirty kilometres downriver from Quebec City, but it bears no resemblance to the town depicted in Bessette's novel.
Retranslating a Quebec ClassicThe Urquhart translation is also still in print.
Pastor Clough remarked more than once that his gravedigger showed little concern for the rituals of pre-burial; he even went so far as to doubt the man's confederacy with Christianity. John Evans was never seen inside the church. He remained for the most part a man unnoticed, passing his days digging deep holes and then refilling them upon the heads the town's deceased. Occasionally he would disappear; on those occasions he would be employed at other towns in the vicinity digging for their burials. No one had to tell him where or when his particular services were required. He just knew. The man had a nose for death. He could sniff its adolescent scent on the breeze and be gone in its direction before the bereaved could gather.All hints at the supernatural, bringing to mind Ray Bradbury's G.M. Dark (Something Wicked This Way Comes) and Stephen King's Leland Gaunt (Needful Things), mysterious outsiders who wreak havoc on small town America. I expected gravedigger Evans to be their Canadian cousin.
The woman had an uncanny knack. If she caught only so much as one word of private conversation, then the cat was out of the bag.As the novel progressed, I became less interested those living in Breery than I did the town as a whole. How did was it, I wondered, that a town of five hundred could support a hardware store and diner? How was it that everyone lived in comfort, despite the Great Depression? More than anything, I wondered how Breery was able to afford a full-time gravedigger.
The boy's breath billowed with the exertion of his haste. It was in his heart to consummate their earliest vague discussion. Since that first talk he'd been savouring with anticipation what he hoped the digger might tell him next. He hurried and was quickly upon the object of his haste.Forever 33 was declared a finalist in the $50,000 Seal Books First Novel Award.
