Greybish's Death and Cabin Fire

The fire at La Grébiche’s home in Touladi became a death without a recoverable body, an official account quickly closed and a village rumor that never died. Loïc recalls the event in September 2001, after Roger Bolduc disappears in the collapse of the World Trade Center complex. The coincidence of dates—both events fall on September 11, and Roger had been born shortly before the 1959 fire—makes the old story seem newly prophetic, though the narrative leaves its central question unresolved: what happened to La Grébiche?

A Fire Before Dawn

In 1959, Loïc was still in Touladi because rubella had kept him from returning to school until mid-September. He therefore learned locally what had happened on September 11, the day La Grébiche vanished from public view. In his later recollection, her disappearance is more certain than her death: the fire consumed her dwelling, but no one could establish what had become of her.

Just before dawn, a sudden red flare lit the dirt road of the rang de la Croix toward the edge of the forest. Terrible cries followed, alarming dogs and setting off a chain of barking through the village. Neighbors who rushed to the cabin with buckets encountered cats with fiery-looking eyes, yowling as they fled from the approaching people. Chickens clucked and fluttered around the burning remains of the home. The flames had already taken the small house and adjoining shed, where piles of papers and old belongings made the buildings a ready tinderbox.

The fire was still too fierce for anyone to search the wreckage. A truck arrived carrying hoses and a pump; Gilbert Rougeau, who served as the municipality’s constable, ordered the crowd back and marked off a boundary while the other two men fought the blaze. At daylight, only blackened beams and a shapeless mass of charred debris remained. Rougeau and his companions searched the smoking ruins as onlookers strained to see over the perimeter. After concentrating their efforts at one spot, they brought a wooden chest, apparently placed objects inside it, carried it back to the truck, and hurried toward the village, leaving a man to guard the site. The scene offered witnesses signs of an investigation, but no public explanation of what the search had uncovered.

An Official Closure, an Unsettled Body

The village authorities moved to contain the story as well as the fire’s aftermath. No newspaper or radio station was allowed to report the incident. The account circulated as the official version reduced it to a local accident: an old woman had burned herself while handling her oil lamp. This explanation was plausible to some residents because La Grébiche had no electricity and kept supplies of petroleum in her shed; a knocked-over lamp, they reasoned, could have set the stored fuel alight. Loïc later wondered whether she might have set the fire herself, but the recollection supplies no proof either way.

Her burial did not resolve the uncertainty. There was no religious ceremony, and the remains were placed in a small box; the priest, Bélanger, regarded La Grébiche as a pagan and a damned soul. The burial was followed almost at once by another intervention: Rougeau had the remains exhumed in the name of the law and taken to Rivière-du-Loup for further examination. No one ever learned what became of what little was left of her body.

The civil authorities closed the case in a terse report that was never made public but remained in the archives. It stated that Lucie Dubé, of the municipality of Saint-Michel de Touladi, had been found carbonized in her home, beyond any possibility of identification, in a fire attributed, without further detail, to an apparent mishap. Thus the report named the woman while also recording that the remains could not be identified. Its administrative conclusion settled the matter on paper, not in local memory.

Rumor, Power, and the Curse

The fire’s violence and the secrecy surrounding it fed competing accounts. Germain Dallaire, the closest neighbor, said that a dreadful cry had awakened him and that he had seen a point of fire above the cabin before the blaze erupted. A veteran of the Korean War who had returned with one eye, he described the sight as recalling an explosion and his wartime fear. Other neighbors seemed unsure whether they had witnessed the same thing, but agreed that they had never seen a fiercer fire. In the village, the ordinary explanation of an oil lamp competed with talk of hellfire and the Devil’s stone, and the rumors acquired a superstitious force of their own.

One account persisted: La Grébiche had been killed and burned to conceal the crime. Its suspected instigator was Romuald Bolduc, Touladi’s wealthiest and most powerful man, who had long hated her. The rumor gave that hatred a specific setting. On September 9, two days after Maurice Duplessis died, Romuald had argued with La Grébiche in the street. His fortune and local power had benefited from lucrative rural-electrification contracts granted by Duplessis’s government, making him an ardent supporter of the premier. La Grébiche reportedly told him that Duplessis’s death marked the beginning of his own end. Romuald turned on her with insults and curses, while old accusations about her past, her association with the Founder of the D’Anjou family, and her supposed pagan magic returned to the argument.

La Grébiche answered by cursing Romuald and his family, declaring that the curse would endure to the last of his line. His wife had given birth to a son two days earlier, and the villagers thought of the newborn when they remembered the threat. The passage does not establish that Romuald arranged the fire or that the curse had supernatural force. Instead, it shows how the village’s political loyalties, old resentments, and fear of La Grébiche’s reputation shaped the stories told about her disappearance.

Loïc’s Retrospective and the Prophetic Pattern

In 2001, Roger Bolduc’s disappearance during the World Trade Center collapse returned Loïc to the 1959 event. Roger had turned forty-two only days before the attacks, and Loïc recognized that he had been born just days before the fire—also on September 11. The date makes the two disappearances echo across decades: Roger’s fate is entangled with a public catastrophe, while La Grébiche’s is hidden inside an isolated village fire and an account that officials quickly suppressed.

For Loïc, the curse now seemed prophetic. He also imagined La Grébiche’s disappearance through the biblical image of Elijah being carried heavenward in a chariot of fire, and his response is affectionate as well as unsettled: he had a weakness for this extraordinary woman. The comparison recasts the fire without resolving it. The official report calls it an accident; local rumor makes it a murder; Loïc’s retrospective turns its flames into a possible sign. None of these interpretations supplies a confirmed cause of death or proof that La Grébiche perished in the cabin.

The memory also brings back a strange dream Loïc had on the night before, or perhaps the night of, her disappearance. He believes that significant events have announced themselves to him since childhood, as though past, present, and future briefly meet in a channel of intuition. In the dream, an unfamiliar procession of villagers carries banners of the Sacred Heart, saints’ scapulars, papal standards, and crosses bearing the instruments of Christ’s Passion; these religious emblems begin to turn into sickles and hammers. The Ladies of Sainte-Anne, dressed in black and violet, pull white-clad girls bound together by a large rosary, while a former rhetoric teacher marches ahead in armor as the Cid. The dream’s juxtaposition of religious ritual, political symbols, and threatened children frames the fire as more than a village mystery in Loïc’s memory: it becomes part of his recurring sense that private catastrophe can be preceded by ominous signs. Yet the remembered visions, like the rumors, leave the event’s material facts incomplete.