Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont

“His fingers must be cold,” Madeleine reasoned, thinking that if she picked a fight with her brother, Papa Louis might suddenly decide to send them all off to bed. She twisted his finger back, just enough to get her point across, but he slipped his hand back under her thigh, and this time she let him.

“Cut it out!” Madeleine retorted before sitting down to his right.

The other brother, Luc, watched a dust mote drift through the air. It was Madeleine Lamontagne’s oldest brother Marc, age seven, who had just told his sister to hurry up and get Papa Louis another drink so the story could at last begin.

In her left hand, she held a full glass of gin that Papa Louis was eyeing thirstily. Papa Louis was sitting in his armchair, and her two brothers on the bottle-green sofa. A cousin had made it after carving up the carcass of the animal that Papa Louis had killed in the fall of 1953, when Madeleine was just three years old. All of which is to say that Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne, or Papa Louis as the children liked to call him, had the full regard of his little Madeleine, sitting right there on the sofa in her father’s funeral home on Rue Saint-François-Xavier, in the parish of the same name, in the town of Rivière-du-Loup in the province of Quebec.Īmid the 1950s furniture stood a ghastly ashtray mounted on an honest-to-goodness moose leg. They’ll also tell you-and there’s no reason to doubt them-that any man’s story, wherever he may be, never finds a more attentive ear than his daughter’s, especially if she is the oldest and as such occupies a special place in her father’s heart. After all, everyone loved to hear Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne’s tall tales.Īs any drinking man in Rivière-du-Loup will tell you, it was TV that killed the Horse, not the combustion engine. Years before her mother bundled her onto a bus bound for New York City in a blizzard, Madeleine Lamontagne had been a little girl who loved Easter bunnies, Christmas trees, and the stories told by her dad, Louis Lamontagne. The American Fiancée was on the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for translation. He was a finalist for both the Prix littéraire France-Québec and the Prix des cinq continents, and was the winner of the Prix littéraire des collégiens and the Prix des libraires. His French-language novel La Logeuse won the Combats des livres. Dupont is an author, teacher and translator from Montreal. The following is from Éric Dupont's The American Fiancée.

Songs for the Cold of Heart by Éric Dupont