Maggie looks up from her typewriter and gazes out the window at her beloved view of the water. She sips her coffee, enjoying the peaceful Sunday morning. The subtle licorice smell of the wildflowers Stephanie picked for her—a lovely homemade bouquet of goldenrod, aster, thistle, and snakeroot—wafts around her. She loves her new home, her life here in Cowansville. After they had Stephanie, they decided to sell the house in Knowlton and move closer to the store. Gabriel never could get comfortable living in Roland’s discarded house.
Roland let her sell the place without a hassle. He’d remarried by then and had children of his own, and he was happy to let her keep the money from the sale of the house. She and Gabriel bought a white 1830 Georgian on two acres of land, overlooking Lac Brome. Gabriel can fish in his free time and still run the farm back home in Dunham. Clémentine has a fiancé now and has relinquished control over the day-to-day operations. Gabriel is finally doing what he was always meant to do—working his field on his own terms. He’s been able to increase revenue on the farm thanks to the expansion of Route 10 into Magog and Sherbrooke, and with the seed store also faring well, they live a better life than either of them ever thought possible.
It’s not lost on Maggie that in many ways she is also living her father’s life. She spends her days serving the sons of the farmers she grew up around, talking seeds and crops and earworms with them, warning them about the pesticides for which her father has become a cautionary tale. Like her father, she is known to engage in long political conversations and the occasional argument (or sermon, if warranted) for she is still an Anglo at heart. Like her father, Maggie isn’t afraid to make her opinions known. She is respected for that, as much as for her knowledge and expertise of seeds.
At the end of each day, before she goes home to prepare supper for the family, she locks herself in her father’s office—she still refers to it as her father’s office—and takes a quiet moment to review the day’s sales or double-check Fred’s bookkeeping, and then to make her to-do list for the next day. She understands now her father’s reluctance to let go of the reins even a little bit. Having her hand in every facet of the business gives her a feeling of security, especially since that new garden store opened up in Granby. It’s called Seed World—the sign doesn’t even include the name in French—and it’s one of those gigantic, industrial-looking warehouses where the customer has to push a cart through the aisles and fend for himself. It smells of hardware, not gardening. At least Maggie’s store still smells of things growing.
Out in the yard, Gabriel and the kids are sprawled in the grass, a bucket of fresh-picked blueberries between them. Maggie watches Gabriel toss a blueberry at James, and then another one at Stephanie. The kids both retaliate, and before long the three of them are engaged in a blueberry fight, their screams of laughter coming in through the windows.
Maggie chuckles to herself as James sticks his hand in the bucket and launches a handful of blueberries at his father. It still confounds her to observe him on the brink of manhood—long-limbed and gangly, almost as tall as Gabriel, with a square jaw and shaggy hair that is too “hippie” for her taste. He’s thirteen and his handsomeness is just budding, his features readjusting themselves within this new larger frame. Seemingly overnight his body shot up, while the rest of him is still scrambling to catch up. She finds herself searching frantically for that little boy she knows once existed somewhere beneath those broad shoulders and big hands and feet that go clomping clumsily around the house, but all traces of her baby are gone.
Maggie’s attention drifts back to her typewriter, and she resumes planning the contents of the spring catalogue. Although corn season is barely underway, by the time her mock-up goes to print, the November deadline will have arrived. She tends to stick to her father’s original layout, dividing it into categories of seeds—grasses and legumes; herbs; fruit and vegetables; grains; flowers—with separate sections for packaging and transport, tools and pesticides. She’s added a section called Tips of the Trade, where she discusses how to identify abnormalities in the seedlings, how to test for moisture, ultimate conditions for germination, and other fascinating topics of that sort.
Corn typically gets the spotlight. She always does very well with the original grow strain of Golden Bantam, and as she starts typing the blurb that will accompany her photographs, she decides to do a special promotion. Thirty cents for a package of a hundred seeds.
When she’s done, she double- and triple-checks for typos—her father abhorred errors in the catalogue and passed down his obsession to Maggie—and then she pulls the paper out with a dramatic flick of the wrist, as though she’s just completed a novel.
As she’s getting up to replenish her coffee, the phone rings. Maggie’s mood dips; she assumes it’s her mother calling to complain about her pending move into the seniors’ home. She contemplates ignoring the call, but guiltily grabs the phone at the last minute. With all the siblings moved away—Geri and Nicole in Montreal, Peter in Toronto, and Violet in Val Racine—Maman has no one else left to make miserable.
“Maggie? It’s Clémentine. Have you read today’s Journal de Montréal?”
“No, why?” Maggie asks, realizing her heart is pounding. Something about the urgency in Clémentine’s voice.
“There’s a story on page three,” Clémentine says. “About the Duplessis orphans.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Maggie. I think it could be her—”
Maggie hangs up and goes off in search of the paper. She finds it untouched on the bathroom vanity, where Gabriel has left it for his after-dinner reading. She doesn’t even bother going into another room, just sits down on the cold tiles beside the toilet and turns straight to page three.
Grown-Up Duplessis Orphans Transition Back Into Society
On a warm spring day in 1967, seventeen-year-old Monique (not her real name) stepped outside the doors of Montreal’s Saint-Nazarius Hospital to claim her freedom. Monique grew up behind the barred windows of the Saint-Nazarius mental ward, not because she was mentally deficient but because she was an orphan. Monique is but one of thousands of healthy, illegitimate children who were diagnosed mentally incompetent in the 1950s under Premier Maurice Duplessis’s government and sent to psychiatric hospitals across the province.
In 1954, Duplessis signed an order-in-council converting the province’s orphanages into hospitals as a way to provide more federal funding to the religious orders that were caring for the orphans. At that time, the Quebec government received federal subsidies for hospitals, but almost nothing for orphanages. Financial contributions for orphans were only $1.25 a day, compared with $2.75 a day for psychiatric patients.
These children weren’t just orphans; they were the province’s abandoned “children of sin,” born out of wedlock, with no one to advocate for them. Monique’s earliest memory is of life at the Saint-Sulpice Orphanage in Farnham, where she lived until she was seven. In those days, it was known as the Home for Unwanted Girls. “But it wasn’t a bad place,” she recalls. “I have no bad memories of it, until they turned it into a mental hospital.”
Monique remembers the day the bus pulled up and a group of elderly mental patients debarked and moved into the place Monique called home. School stopped abruptly that day, and Monique was given the job of caring for the mental patients, right up until her transfer to Saint-Nazarius in 1957.
What was life like for a normal-functioning child growing up in a mental institution? At her basement apartment in Pointe Saint-Charles, Monique pulls out a notebook filled with detailed documentation of her experience there—her drawings, journal entries, and dreams. If not for the benevolence and quotidian care of the Sisters of Saint-Nazarius, it’s hard to imagine what would have become of children like Monique. The nuns in charge of the overcrowded mental wards had their work cut out for them. It was the norm to have just one nun overseeing at least fifty children on a ward without any assistance. Stretched to their limits, they had to run a tight ship and could be strict disciplinarians.
“I was put to work right away,” Monique says. “Cleaning toilets, sewing. We were harshly punished for even the smallest mistakes.”
But there were happy times, too. Christmas concerts, excursions to nearby towns, friendships that will last a lifetime. After she left the hospital, Monique lived with a former roommate from Saint-Nazarius, who was also released as a result of a commission in the early sixties tasked with investigating these institutions. It was reported in 1962 that more than twenty thousand patients did not belong, after which followed the steady release of many of the now grown orphans, who were sent out into the world to find work and live normal lives.
Like most of the orphans in her situation, Monique left Saint-Nazarius with few life skills. Describing herself as childlike and “backwards,” Monique says, “I didn’t even know how to peel and boil a potato.”
And yet thanks to the diligence of the Sisters of Saint-Nazarius, Monique could sew and was able to find work almost immediately as a seamstress. She’s been able to support herself and transition back into the fold of regular society. Time will tell the full story about the ramifications of Duplessis’s initiatives, but for now, Monique is leading a quiet, normal life, which, she says, is all she ever wanted. “I’m not crazy,” she says. “I never was. I’m just like everyone else you see on the street.”
Maggie finishes the article and gets up off the floor. She doesn’t bother calling Clémentine back; instead, she runs outside, wildly waving the paper in her hand and calling out to Gabriel.