on the last day of october, a beautiful fall day, david mccann knelt at a headstone in st-victor cemetery in alfred, ont., 70 kilometres east of ottawa. there, he laid a bouquet of flowers at the marker, quietly read aloud the names of the three young men inscribed on the stone, and wept. not long afterwards, he left, both the cemetery and alfred. before he did, he paused momentarily to survey the town, and said, “i’ll never come back to this place.”
i am sure he’ll not set foot in alfred again. i’m less sure that he can ever completely leave.
but with that quiet ceremony, the 78-year-old mccann, now a vancouver resident, can at least close one chapter of a saga that has haunted him since he was 12.
it was that long ago, in december 1958, that mccann was brought to st. joseph’s training school for boys, a reform school in alfred run by the de la salle brothers of the christian schools, a roman catholic papal religious lay order. like many others there, he was sexually, physically and psychologically abused by the brothers.
mccann got out, two years later. but not everyone who attended st. joseph’s was as fortunate. the three young men whose names are etched on the headstone, for example, never left. jean marion, who was 17 or 18 when he died as the result of an explosion in 1946; gérald corbeil, who was 16 when he died the following year in a farming accident; and claude deschamps, just a boy of 12 or 13 when he drowned in 1957, were each interred in a unmarked grave in st-victor cemetery, adjacent to the school, without remembrance of any kind.