Shake Hands With the Devil Read Online Free PDF

herself. She was nostalgic for the scouting movement of her childhood in Holland and got involved with Scouts Canada, which operated out of the English Protestant school. She dragged me along with her to the first meeting, sternly telling me that the only reason I was being allowed to go was so that I could improve my English. I loved Cubs and made some great friends there, but at that time, it was an Anglican as well as an anglophone outfit. I used to joke that if I went to Cubs on Tuesday night, I was off to confession on Wednesday at the crack of dawn.
    Being a Cub had social as well as religious consequences. The francophone kids and the anglophone kids formed separate neighbourhood gangs and were bitter foes; the fact that I had friends on both sides marked me as suspect, possibly a traitor. This did not make life easy for me. I remember my sister Juliette, only five or six, being caught in a crossfire of rock-throwing between French and English gangs in ourback alley. My francophone friends and I rescued her. She was cut and bleeding from the back of her head, and we lifted her to safety over a fence. We then launched a counterattack that sent the anglos scurrying into a tarpaper shed, which we proceeded to set on fire. Our siege abruptly ended when a seemingly enormous mother intervened. Days later, I was still harassing those anglos for hurting my little sister. Eventually we struck a ceasefire, and in the next encounter, I found myself in the anglo ranks. So it went, back and forth.
    I attended the local boys-only Catholic school, which was run by the Brothers of Saint Gabriel. The brothers often dropped by our house, usually in time for supper, to visit with my parents. My father was a member of the Knights of Columbus and was also a well-known and respected grassroots Liberal Party organizer; my mother was heavily involved in the women’s Liberal organization and in charity work. A visit from the brothers was not always a comfortable occasion for me, however, as they often complained about my lacklustre performance in the classroom.
    My saving grace was that I was a soloist in the choir. Brother Léonidas, the choirmaster, though quite stern, was a gifted musician, and he was thrilled that I could sing the few English songs in our repertoire. He was constantly hauling us off to choir competitions where we generally did quite well.
    I also secured the coveted position of altar boy, a nice sideline that netted me twenty-five cents a week, plus an additional dime or more for weddings and funerals. I soon learned that funerals were often far more elaborate, and therefore more profitable, than weddings and that the music tended to be better, too.
    But it was my dancing that raised my profile among the girls segregated in the convent school across the street, though I had to be careful that the brothers never caught me holding hands with one. Punishment for that sort of fraternization was immediate: transcription of pages out of the dictionary, down on my knees in the corner of the classroom. The brothers and nuns would station themselves at strategic windows to keep a watchful eye out for any hanky-panky on the way to or from school. The only time the two sexes were allowed to mix was duringfolk-dancing-club practices, which were organized by the parish and later by the schools—under heavy supervision. We learned all the traditional French-Canadian folk dances, but also the dances of other nations. I remember especially loving the Jewish dances, because in order to be authentic, we performed them barefoot, imagining that the hard, cold gymnasium floor was actually soft, warm desert sand. The thrill of seeing a girl’s naked feet and ankles was almost unbearable.
    In high school I carried on as an indifferent scholar, more interested in sports than studying, until the day an old friend of my father’s stopped in at the house for a visit. He was a major who had served with my dad in the war. They talked