When the Toronto Choral Society dedicated its spring concert to the memory of the people buried in Potter's Field cemetery, choir director Geoffrey Butler hired several writers to create a book for the event.
Our assignment was to read through the epitaphs, choose one of the deceased, and write his or her story. I chose Louise Lenfesty because hers was the only epitaph written in French. Through a combination of research at the Toronto Archives and a bit of imagination to fill in the blanks, here's what I wrote.
Lilies for you, Louise. Three years, five months since the sanatorium director announced your parting to Pierre.
You were mostly a stranger here. York still has very few French speakers, fewer with your peculiar Channel Island accent. As neighbours we barely understood each other, but together picked huckleberries on Bloor, or baked galettes while you sang to your son what sounded like, "coo-luh-coo-luh-coo-luh." Singing made your freckled face smile.
After a year you knew enough English to tell me about your homeland. I wish you had not. For when the wagon took you away, pale as porcelain to the sanatorium, I could almost see reflected in your fevered eyes the misty green hills and stormy waters of Guernsey.
I imagine you, just married, waving to your parents as you left for faraway Gaspé. Then on to York, which your husband thought held promise for a grocer. You were drawn and feeble after weeks at sea. Pierre, carrying Pierre junior in his arms, looked sturdier.
Your son, at age four, has joined you. I believe he caught a bilious ailment from Taddle Creek fish.
Pierre sailed to New York after the market was burned in the Great Fire. Lord willing, may he start a new life without mud or pestilence. But it will be as though he never came to York, never had a family.
You did exist, Louise, though only Pierre and I and this headstone know it. Who were you before you immigrated here, muted by language and ailed by circumstance and became, for a brief time, my friend?