Not Exactly a War Hero: The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Mondou

ISBN 978-1-7751529-1-0

Copyright © Ray Verdon 2013

Cover art, design, illustrations: Magdalene Carson

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means without

the prior written permission of the publisher or,

in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from

Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),

One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

This is a work of fiction, albeit historical fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. This book is not intended as a substitute for your own research into related historical events.

Contents

Cover

Frontispiece

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Prologue

ONE

August 1947

TWO

January 1942

THREE

August 1947

FOUR

November 1944

FIVE

August 1947

SIX

December 1944

SEVEN

August 1947

EIGHT

December 1944

NINE

August 1947

TEN

January 1945

ELEVEN

August 1947

TWELVE

February 1945

THIRTEEN

August 1947

FOURTEEN

February 1945

FIFTEEN

August 1947

SIXTEEN

August 1947

SEVENTEEN

August 1947

EIGHTEEN

August 1947

NINETEEN

August 1947

Epilogue

Author’s Note

About the Author

To Canada’s zombies, dead or alive

We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling.

We come from Canada, this land that is like every land,

filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

Kerri Sakamoto

Acknowledgements

In addition to my mother, who passed away only days before the completion of this book, I am grateful to all of my family, Brian Doyle, Shelley Tanaka, Daniel Wiener, and the other Dan, as well as GSPH, for their generous assistance.

Prologue

THE OLD BARN still smelled like hay and oats and sweet manure. On my right, along the wall, I saw rusted scythes, harnesses hanging on pegs, horseshoes propped on a side beam. I saw a rotted wooden washing machine and the stable and mangers beyond.

The sun streamed through the cracks in a dust stream that danced across some timber planks. And to my left stood the cutter. Mac’s one-­horse shay.

It was a smaller, more pitiful skeleton of the sleigh I remembered, but I saw it with a warmth I can’t describe. I had been gone from the barn for a thousand years, but now I saw and smelled and sensed as a boy.

Suddenly, a crow appeared out of the shadows. It hopped onto the sleigh seat where I had always sat with Mac. It looked at me and then fluttered sideways to Mac’s spot on the bench.

I stood there staring at the huge, black, silvery-­wet bird.

I had to sit with the crow.

As I crawled up onto the bench of the cutter, the crow flew away, but not far. It sat on a rafter above me and looked at me with its wise black eyes. I stared back, trying to be patient. Trying to think like Mac.

The crow will know.

After a time, I looked down at the Calèche de Jos. Ledoux brass plate, the skis and the shafts, and the faded leather seat studded onto the aged and weathered wood. I reached down and touched the compartment beneath the seat. I looked up. The crow seemed to lean forward. My hand touched the rough rug blanket. Fifty years later, the blanket was still waiting in the barn for a sleigh ride. Mac would want me to air it out.

I had trouble extricating it. I got to my knees and saw that the blanket was wrapped in a wide black belt with a big square bronze buckle like Santa Claus would wear. I smiled, thinking Mac might have made the belt. The whole package was jammed tight into the compartment. I got a grip on the belt, pulled out the blanket, and saw that it was wrapped around something. I placed the bundle on the seat, unhooked the belt, and opened up the blanket.

And there it was.

Back in the farmhouse, I dropped my cumbersome bundle in the middle of Mac’s dining-­room table. The ledger was old, worn leather, deep-­stuffed, the spine stretched. When I removed the bands, pages slid sideways onto the table.

It smelled of mothballs, and although many of the pages were faded and stained, for the most part, Mac’s firm hand was legible. There were not only pages of writing, but an odd assortment of maps, sketches, and newspaper articles.

On the ledger sheets I could see Mac’s neat tallying of accounts, but I was more interested in the notepaper between the pages. Hundreds of crinkly, yellowed pages, sections held together with Niagara clips, each with its own carded identifier: Sketches, Found Fun, Assorted Maps, Newspapers/Magazines, War and Conscription, Ditties, Last Will and Testament, Talking to Myself, and a clutter of loose single sheets, memoranda, and finally, photos, and an old, worn, soiled, brown leather book.

The litter of a life, hundreds of pieces all inside a ledger, wrapped in a blanket, bound by a belt, stuffed in a sled, and abandoned in a barn for me to find.

The largest sheaf was at the very bottom, with a card that read, Letters from the Hereafter. I eased off the clip and smoothed the top sheet.

Dear Raymond,

Remember our trip to the zombie grave in the Hereafter and that week of adventure in August 1947, Raymond? Remember that?

How could you forget?

ONE

August 1947

JAYSUS!

Mac lunged from his rocker, tapped the dottle from his pipe, grabbed his .22, and limped full-­tilt toward the road.

I started after him, but stopped. I should get Smoky out of the farmhouse, I thought.

Mac turned to me, shook his head and put his finger to his lips in a sh-­shing gesture as if he’d read my mind. He circled the blacksmith shop and started up the gravel road toward the graveyard and St. Martin’s Church.

I had never seen my uncle move so fast, let alone toward the church. The Hereafter, he called it. He had a perfect view of it and the graveyard from his front porch. Mostly he’d just sit and rock and play his harmonica and stare up at it. Not a lot of laughter up yon in the Hereafter, he always said.

Something was up.

When Mac neared the top of the hill, he slowed a lot, stepping like he was afraid he’d wake the dead. I did the same. He peered around the thick, bushy sumac and waved me back. Slowly he crept forward until I could see that he was stalking a big, black shadow standing in the graveyard. The shadow was staring down at something. Mac stepped more slowly, stretching to try to see what the shadow was looking at.

Suddenly the shadow turned in our direction. It started moving away, north toward Mac’s grove. The dusk was so dull and dark that I could barely see the towering iron cross at the back of the graveyard. The shadow just disappeared into the gloom of the trees. There was no catching it, but Mac didn’t seem to care. He just trudged to where the shadow had been standing. He had the straight-­ahead look of someone who didn’t want to lose his place.

The gravestones were all around us now. Not like the creepy abandoned ones down the hill where I’d go to read the tiny ages on the gravestones. These were all neat and organized in rows — up, down, and across. Mac stared down at one gravestone, moved to the one to the right of it, and back to his first choice. I was mostly looking at where the shadow had gone. The fog was turning into a cold, misty spray.

The zombie was looking at this one, Mac muttered.

Mac was talking to himself, which he did all the time, but it was the word zombie that did something to my stomach. I knew about zombies from the movies. They were dead folks. Corpses who clawed themselves out of coffins and walked around looking for the brains of dead people to eat.

Now, that’s odd.

What was odd about a grave in a graveyard?

Mac again looked up at the back of the cemetery, nodded, and then got down on one knee and started to read quietly.

"Alfred Mondou, née 1920 and a dash but there’s no date of death. Je sais qu’il vit."

I didn’t understand the French stuff, but I noticed the mark at the bottom of the gravestone below the writing. It wasn’t a cross like on some of the other gravestones. It was a capital P with a Z or something scrawled through it.

The misty spray was now turning to rain, clinging to the gravestones and the grass. But Mac just knelt there with his knee in the wet.

I looked around at other gravestones. Egan, O’Malley, Gannon, McCal, McLaughlin. There was a Gleason, like Mac’s last name, some French name, and a McCracken, and a McGoey, and a McCay. I was close to figuring out that the small Faye McCay gravestone, not far from where I was standing, was a girl who was nearly nine, just like me. It gave me the heebie-­jeebies.

Mac finally stood and turned and, muttering to himself, headed out of the graveyard, and I followed him. The rain was now falling hard and cold on my neck and bare arms. It felt more like early April than August.

That’s when I saw Marian standing on the porch of the priest’s house beside the church. She was waving at me with her goofy wrist wave. Even through the fog and the rain, I could see her caramel-­coloured hair, loose and shining around the brightest, widest smile I had ever seen.

Besides me, she has the best head in the Gatineau, Mac always said, but he was talking about how smart she was.

I wondered if Marian had seen the Shadow Man, too. I started to wave back at her and then I slipped on the wet grass, slid down to the road, and ripped my elbow on a rock.

I jumped up quickly so she wouldn’t think I was a weak little shit. My elbow was bleeding. I rolled down my shirtsleeve to mop up the blood, which was stupid because zombies would be after my brains, not my blood. And if zombies were clawing themselves out of coffins, we were dead anyway.

I ran to catch up with Mac to ask him about the strange mark on the gravestone, but he was hunched forward doing his angry grumbling.

He’s like the deer, Raymond, he muttered. Just appears in the fog. Floats out of the church like a spirit.

I was thinking that Smoky would have caught the zombie if he’d been with us, but instead I said, Zombies aren’t real, Mac.

It was dark now, and as Mac stepped onto his porch, he planted his arm on a pillar, swung around, and put his face right into mine.

That’s what they’d like you to think, he whispered through his gap-­toothed grin. Aaauuuggg-­chomp-­chomp-­chomp.

TWO

January 1942

IT WAS AN OLD CUSTOM in Quebec for an aged farmer to hand over his land to his eldest son, retaining only a life rent. But the real reason Père Mondou conceded the farm to Alfred Mondou’s father, Renard, was to get his prodigal son to return to the job at hand. Even as a young teenager, Renard was constantly escaping the confines of the small Fieldville farm to take road and railbed work from Wakefield to Kazabazua.

"You’re out there day and night. The cows won’t wait. You know that. And I know all about the drinking and les blondes anglaises. They’re not for you, tabernac."

Renard knew it was his responsibility to work the land of merde that barely provided enough for a family to live on. After a lifetime on the land, his father was still clearing pine and digging rock and barely eking out an existence on barren soil that was locked in snow and ice for half the year.

So Renard took on the farm and the rest of the family, whose lives centred around the Mondou homestead … sisters yet to be married, Mondou cousins, and aunts and uncles with nearby farms.

A small house was built for Mère and Père only a hundred yards from the farmhouse. Then, on a winter wonderland day, Renard brought his pregnant Colleen home following a ceremony at Holy Name, and a raucous wedding fête was held inside the covered bridge near the village of Fieldville. Colleen quickly gave birth to Marc, Alfred, Céline, Marie, and Claudette. Renard worked the farm, first with his father, and then with sons.

All the while, he was becoming known as one of the finest woodworkers and vivants in the Gatineau. Colleen raised her children and stalked the two solitudes, teaching English or French, whichever was needed.

Renard gave the signed primogeniture paper to his son Marc when he was only fourteen. It’s yours whether you want the fardel or not, he announced.

By 1929, Renard was off to Montebello, often taking his younger son, Alfred, with him. Chateau Montebello was the world’s largest log cabin. It was the biggest woodworking job in Quebec’s history, and Alfred, without farm, was taught his father’s skills. Renard knew that Alfred was more restless than Marc, who was happy to just farm his fields. What Alfred missed in school, Colleen could teach him. The boy was smart, and tall and strong for his age. His Algonquin soul showing, his grandmother would always say, but that’s another story.

While his father directed men on the massive interior rotunda, Alfred worked with a second, smaller crew on armoires and the additional wings containing the dining room and ballroom. The older men called Alfred Le P’tit Papineau — a great compliment, because Louis Joseph Papineau had been the brilliant, cultured, and renowned founder and leader of the seigneury that dominated the area.

P’tit stayed to do cleanup work even after his father left Montebello to grab a longer-­term opportunity in Low working at the Paugan Dam. P’tit slept in the chateau stables at night with the other labourers and worked fourteen-­hour days until all the finishing touches were complete. By 1932, he was at the Paugan working with his father. Hydro Québec knew that Alfred was underage, but they valued the father-­and-­son skills so much that they overlooked the issue.

Everyone in the Gatineau began to call the Mondou clan "le syndicat. Renard was widely known as le patron," and he loved it. He could even foresee that Alfred would become the next Mondou patron.

Only God can stop us now, Alfred.

For years, Alfred would wonder if God had considered his father’s boast a challenge.

When the Paugan was just about complete, the Gatineau River was diverted into what was known as the bypass. One day, the man who had been told to open one of the side gates opened the centre one by mistake, just as a log boom was coming down the upper Gatineau. The boom was sucked through the gates by the great force of the current.

A number of men went down with the logs. Some managed to swim ashore, but Renard couldn’t swim. Alfred watched with horror as his father was pulverized by a log. They found his battered body two days later. P’tit