The Odor of Sin

At his summer home 15 miles north of Ottawa, the late Prime Minister Mackenzie King used to walk visitors to the boundary of his property and point toward the misty, blue-green hills to the north. "Beyond this point," he would say, "there is nothing but the North Pole."

King was not quite accurate. The hills and valleys flanking Quebec's swift Gatineau River teem with habitations and inhabitants: logging camps and old farm villages, hunting lodges of U.S. and Canadian sportsmen, mountaineers living in ancestral log cabins, remnants of the Algonquin and Tetes de Boule Indian tribes, moose, black bears and--to hear the natives tell it--ghosts, werewolves and a ubiquitous, blood-guzzling witch, the Windigo.

Big Joe & Just Joe. In this setting dwell some of the most primitive white people in North America, the Gatineau mountaineers. They scratch out a meager living by farming and lumbering. Faith healers, seers and hermits abound among them. Families sometimes grow so big that parents run out of names. The woods are populated with brothers named Black Luke and Red Luke, Little Joe, Big Joe and Just Joe.

More terrifying than the Windigo to some of the mountaineers is a 5-ft. wisp of a woman who in her childhood decided that she would "bring religion" to the cabins in the hills. Now a grey-haired 42, Jessie Hyde was brought up in a brick house on her father's 200-acre farm. At ten she "heard God's voice clearly calling me." At 14 she held revival meetings in a schoolhouse. A few years later she began trudging the hills as a determined reformer.

Brimstone & Hysteria. There was plenty to reform. The hill people are fond of a local liquor that approaches 200-proof, and their disregard for God's commandment against adultery makes Hollywood seem puritanical. Incest is common. "I know dozens of cousins who are living together," Jessie Hyde said recently. "I know men who stay with their aunts and girls who stay with their uncles."

In her efforts to scour away some of this blackness, Jessie used to gather mountaineer women into meetings. She would suddenly stand up and snap, "I smell sin," then launch into a sermon reeking with brimstone. One of Gatineau's few doctors recalls: "These ignorant women didn't know how Jessie had found them out, and were terrified when she started telling them the agonies of hellfire. Next day my office would be full of hysterical women about to have a breakdown."

Diversions & Hope. It was a relief to the hill people when, in 1939, Jessie went off to study at the Bible Institute in faraway Winnipeg. She stayed in the West to preach, but five years ago came back to the Gatineau to take up her mission of sniffing out sin. Last year, after persuading businessmen of the region to provide her with funds, she turned the old family farmhouse into a home for unwanted children. Caring for eleven children diverted some of Jessie's attention from the sins of their elders. Then another diversion appeared: a Fundamentalist preacher named Lloyd Waterston, 15 years younger than Jessie, came to the hills to help Jessie run the home, soon asked her to marry him. Last week Jessie and Lloyd Waterston returned home from their honeymoon. The mountaineers were cautiously hopeful. Remarked one of them: "Thank God. With all them children and a young husband to keep her busy, maybe she'll leave us alone."

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