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wouldn’t let us sneak up and peer through the windows, which made it illicit and attractive. After my brother began going to school in the winters he told me it was called the Mass and what they did inside was eat; I imagined it as a sort of birthday party, with ice cream – birthday parties were my only experience then of people eating in groups – but according to my brother all they had was soda crackers.
    When I started school myself I begged to be allowed to go to Sunday School, like everyone else; I wanted to find out, also I wanted to be less conspicuous. My father didn’t approve, he reacted as though I’d asked to go to a pool hall: Christianity was something he’d escaped from, he wished to protect us from its distortions. But after a couple of years he decided I was old enough, I could see for myself, reason would defend me.
    I knew what you wore, itchy white stockings and a hat and gloves; I went with one of the girls from school whose family took a pursed-mouth missionary interest in me. It was a United Church, it stood on a long grey street of block-shaped buildings. On the steeple instead of a cross there was a thing like an onion going around which they said was a ventilator, and inside it smelled of face powder and damp wool trousers. The Sunday School part was in the cellar; it had blackboards like a regular school, with K I CKAPOO JOY JUICE printed on one of them in orange chalk and underneath, in green chalk, the mysterious initials C.G. I. T. This was a possible clue, until they translated it for me, Canadian Girls In Training. The teacher wore maroon nail-polish and a blue pancake-sized hat clipped to her head by two prongs; she told us a lot about her admirers and their cars. At the end she handed out pictures of Jesus, who didn’t have thorns and ribs but was alive and draped in a bed sheet, tired-looking, surely incapable of miracles.
    After church every time, the family I went with drove to a hill above the railway terminal to watch the trains shunting back and forth; it was their Sunday treat. Then they would have me to lunch, which was always the same thing, pork and beans and canned pineapple for dessert. At the beginning the father would say Grace, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, Amen,” while the four children pinched and kicked each other under the table; and at the end he would say,
Pork and beans the musical fruit,
The more you eat the more you toot.
    The mother, who had a bun of greying hair and prickles around her mouth like a schmoo, would frown and ask me what I’d learned about Jesus that morning, and the father would grin feebly, ignored by all; he was a clerk in a bank, the Sunday trains his only diversion, the little rhyme his only impropriety. For some time I had a confused notion that canned pineapple really was musical and would make you sing better, until my brother set me straight.
    “Maybe I’ll be a Catholic,” I said to my brother; I was afraid to say it to my parents.
    “Catholics are crazy,” he said. The Catholics went to a school down the street from ours and the boys threw snowballs at them in winter and rocks in spring and fall. “They believe in the B.V.M. ”
    I didn’t know what that was and neither did he, so he said “They believe if you don’t go to Mass you’ll turn into a wolf.”
    “Will you?” I said.
    “We don’t go,” he said, “and we haven’t.”
    Maybe that’s why they didn’t waste any sweat searching for my father, they were afraid to, they thought he’d turned into a wolf; he’d be a prime candidate since he never went to Mass at all. Les maudits anglais , the damned English, they mean it; they’re sure we’re all damned literally. There should be a loup-garou story in Quebec Folk Tales , perhaps there was and Mr. Percival took it out, it was too rough for him. But in some of the stories they do it the other way round, the animals are human inside and they take their fur skins off