The Quintland Sisters
Shelley Wood
Dedication
For Mum
Epigraph
By the light of the moon One could barely see.
The pen was looked for, The light was looked for.
With all that looking
I don’t know what was found, But I do know that the door Shut itself on them.
—“Au Clair de la Lune,”
eighteenth-century French folksong
Preface
Fonds consists of 72 cm of textual records including correspondence, diaries, drawings, and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings from the estate of Emma Grace Trimpany (1916?2008), artist, Member of the Order of Canada, 1981, relating to her involvement with the Dionne quintuplets between 1934 and 1954.
Language of material: English and French Restrictions on access: None Accruals: Further accruals are not expected.
Custodial history: Documents submitted to the Library and Archives Canada, April 5, 2008, by Ms. Trimpany’s sole heir, David L. Trimpany (b. 1955), son.
1934
May 28, 1934
If I don’t write this down this very minute, or as much of it as possible, I will forget half of it, or something will happen—one of them will die—and everything I might have written will be changed by that, instead of the way it feels now.
The doctor has just left and everyone else seems to have more or less forgotten about me. Marie-Jeanne asked him if he’d drop me off back in Callander, but before he could answer, I asked if I could stay and the doctor nodded curtly, then headed out to his car. Now Marie-Jeanne and Mme. Legros are busying themselves heating chicken broth on the stove for Mme. Dionne, who is finally starting to stir again. M. Dionne has gone to find the parish priest. He tore off in his own truck, the door slapping closed behind him as if the house itself had done something wrong. Poor M. Dionne. He had been pacing the front porch, back and forth, back and forth, until the doctor finally asked him to step back inside and told him about the babies. His expression made him look like a face from the funnies, stretched wide and delirious with disbelief.
While the midwives were looking after Mme. Dionne, I fetched my pencil and scribble book from my bag and took my seat again beside the chairs at the open stove. I’ve tried to draw the babies entwined in their box surrounded by all the bricks and flatirons we heated on the fire, then wrapped in rough blankets. I know I haven’t quite captured them, but it doesn’t matter. I just want something to remember this night, no matter what happens.
IT WAS MOTHER’S idea that Marie-Jeanne Lebel, the local midwife, should come to fetch me, no matter the hour, the next time she was called out. Of course that ended up being in the middle of the night. And naturally it was Mother, not me, who had already decided midwifery might be a reasonable career for me to consider—always in demand, a respectable job for a woman, particularly a bilingual one like me. Mme. Lebel worked mostly with the French families.
“Even those who can’t pay with money will find some other way to keep you clothed and fed,” Mother liked to remind me. “Scribbles, drawings, and books won’t put food on the table.”
Mme. Lebel stopped by our place on her way home from church yesterday and asked if I was truly up for attending a birth with her. Mother answered yes on my behalf. The truth is, I really had very little idea what was in store, and if I’d known I would never in a million years have agreed to this. Mme. Lebel said there was a lady a few blocks away whose baby was likely to come at any minute, and that she’d stop by for me later that day or night. I should be showered and dressed in clean clothes. Not my best clothes, mind, but something clean.
So I was ready, reluctantly, when the midwife rapped at the door sometime past midnight. A small man I didn’t know was waiting in a battered farm truck at the curb and looked rigid with anxiety. Mme. Lebel said tersely that the lady in our neighborhood had delivered that evening—it had happened too fast for her to call me—but that a Frenchwoman in the nearby hamlet of Corbeil had gone into labor two months early and there would likely be complications.
“Two months is too premature,” she clucked. “The baby may not survive.”
Mme. Lebel has a deep voice that sounds like an engine running in low gear and she smells like peppermints. “Call me Marie-Jeanne,” she growled, after I mumbled something about hoping I could be of use. The man in the truck was gripping the steering wheel like a life ring, his face in darkness, the streetlight illuminating his hands, brown and callused from the fields, the nails black and jagged. Marie-Jeanne waited until we were seated in the truck before introducing him as M. Oliva Dionne, and he mumbled a terse bonsoir as he steered out of town, his foot heavy on the pedal.
“M. Dionne and his wife, Elzire, already have five children,” Marie-Jeanne murmured, her voice flat. “The youngest is just under a year.”
Fifteen minutes later, M. Dionne pulled up in front of a small farmhouse tucked in the rocky pasture that runs along the Corbeil-Callander road. A feeble light glowed softly from the windows, but the moon was high and bright, revealing a sagging porch and a short flight of steps leading up to the door. Faces, those of the other children, I presumed, were pressed against the glass of a window on the upper floor. One gave a cautious wave as we hurried into the house.
Elzire Dionne was on her back, clutching the frame of a thin wooden bed in a ground-floor room off the kitchen when we arrived, bellowing in pain. Two oil lamps flickered weakly, the flames seeming to shudder with each cry from the bed. M. Dionne hurried to her side, his eyes wild, and his wife clamped a plump hand around his rough fingers. Marie-Jeanne bustled in and shooed him away, ordering him to head upstairs and to keep the other children from worrying about their mother. Little waifs, all of them—they’d crept down the narrow stairs when we arrived looking like a pack of scarecrows, their mismatched nightclothes swaying off their bones.