Charles the Bold

by Yves Beauchemin

  “You remember Alice, don’t you, boy?” he said. “You remember when you used to come and walk with us to the daycare? She was pretty nice, my mother, wasn’t she? I loved her a lot … But anyway now she’s dead and I won’t see her ever again … Not ever …”

  The dog, as though sensing the gravity of the moment, waited patiently for Charles to let it go, though it never stopped wagging its tail.

  6

  That day Charles said he was going back to the daycare, and then left without saying anything more. Wilfrid stayed in the kitchen for a long time, sipping beer and anxiously watching the telephone. He was terrified that it would ring and it would be a social worker or – who knew – the police, asking embarrassing questions and saying they were coming to speak to him. But the day passed without incident.

  His son came home at four o’clock. He seemed calm and even relatively happy; he sat in front of the TV, as he usually did when he came home from daycare, then went into his room and stayed there until dinner was ready. He ate a good meal, answered questions about his day, although briefly, without volunteering anything on his own, and avoiding even glancing up at his father. “Getting back to normal,” Wilfrid told himself. “Just have to give it time. Mostly I’ve got to learn to control myself; I could end up in the slammer if I go on behaving like that! Can you see yourself in prison, you idiot? Just try getting work after that!”

  Fear gave way to remorse, and then to a desire to make things up somehow to his son. Not that he thought such a thing was possible. How do you reconcile yourself with someone you’ve never really felt close to before, nor he to you? Still, habit alone didn’t account for the vague feelings he had for Charles; there was a kind of fatherly love there, basic and crude though it was, never having found much nourishment to make it grow, yet yearning feebly for expression without quite achieving it.

  “You could spoil the kid a bit, you know,” Sylvie said to him one day. “It would solve a lot of problems. Spoil a kid rotten and he’ll be a pain in the ass, but spoil him a little bit and he’ll love you for it. After all, you’ve got another dozen years or so before he leaves home, so you might as well make it as easy on yourself as you can …”

  For a while Wilfrid tried hard to get on the good side of his son. At night when he came home he sometimes brought him a chocolate bar. One afternoon he took him to the movies to see The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe. But his efforts were without much success. Charles thanked him politely but remained cool and reserved, hardly spoke to him at all, and arranged to spend as much time outside the apartment as he could.

  Then one night the carpenter had a brainstorm. Winter was drawing to a close; the previous week a businessman had hired him to do some repairs to a bowling alley; he’d been working at it from early morning until late at night, since the lanes were scheduled to reopen shortly. On the day of his inspiration, however, he left work at seven because of an equipment breakdown. He’d just come up from the Frontenac metro station, his mind dwelling comfortably on an evening spent with a case of beer in front of the television, when he saw his son on the sidewalk ahead of him, hopping about with a little friend surrounded by a half-dozen dogs. His face lit up, he gave his thigh a loud slap and hastened his step, smiling broadly.

  “Hi there, son!” he called when he was about ten paces away.

  “Hi, Papa,” Charles replied, surprised by his father’s tone. His face, which a moment before had been happy and animated, took on a pained, almost sullen expression; he went back to his game, but his heart no longer seemed to be in it.

  Wilfrid remained standing next to the boys, who soon stopped playing, intimidated by his presence; a small, black, short-haired dog ran between the carpenter’s legs, while another, a sort of bulldog, began sniffing at his lunch pail.

  “Where do all these dogs come from?” Wilfrid asked, pushing the animal off. “I don’t know anyone around here who has a dog.”

  “I don’t know,” Charles said, keeping his eyes down. He put his arms around the bulldog’s neck and pulled it away from his father.

  “That one there,” said Charles’s friend Henri, pointing to the black dog, “he lives over on rue Poupart, and the big one who’s chewing his paw, he lives on Coupal. The others we don’t know about …”

  “You don’t?”

  “No, we don’t know,” said Henri, encouraged by the carpenter’s interest. “Maybe they got lost, or maybe someone threw them out. It’s possible … That one, though,” he added, indicating the yellow spaniel with the different-sized ears, sitting before them as though following their conversation, “he for sure doesn’t have a home, because he’s been spending his nights in an old garage that nobody uses any more, over near our house; last month my father went out and took him a piece of insulation so he’d have something warm to sleep on.”

  “I’m surprised the pound hasn’t picked him up by now,” the carpenter said. “Don’t you let him in the house sometimes?”

  “Not very often. When he comes inside, my mother sneezes and her eyes start to run.”

  Charles had let go of the bulldog, which was now busy snuffling at a pop can by the curb, and was sitting jauntily astride the spaniel. The dog turned its head from time to time to lick the boy’s hand.

  “Would you like to keep him?” Wilfrid asked his son.

  Charles’s eyes widened and he almost choked. Had he heard correctly? Had his father, who had declared a hundred times that a dog wasn’t worth the scraps from their table, and who rolled his eyes every time he saw Charles with his band of four-footed friends, really just asked him if he wanted to take the spaniel home?

  The carpenter laughed at the expression of disbelief on his son’s face:

  “What’s the matter, eh? Cat got your tongue? I asked you a question.”

  “Do you mean … you mean I can keep him at our place?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  A huge smile spread over the boy’s face, and his eyes shone so brightly that they looked as though they were filling up with tears.

  “Oh, yes! I’d like that very much, Papa … That would be the best present I’ve ever had in my life!”

  “Well, then, bring him along,” replied Wilfrid.

  And under the dumbfounded gaze of Henri, who also knew of the carpenter’s aversion to the canine race, Wilfrid continued on his way home while Charles, kneeling before the spaniel, explained to it the profound change of fortune that had just taken place in the dog’s life.

  Hearing the news, Sylvie let out a sigh deep enough to blow down the house, but the carpenter told her dryly that he was merely following the advice that she herself had given him.

  “You wanted me to spoil him, didn’t you? Well, I’m spoiling him. Do you know of anything that would make him any happier?”

  “No. On the other hand, I don’t know of anything that will make you less happy. I give it a week, and you’ll be wanting to nail the bloody beast to a wall!”

  “We’ll take it one day at a time, my dear,” was all he replied, in a philosophical calm.

  Ten minutes later Charles came in dragging the spaniel. Uncertain of what was happening and wanting to learn as much about its new surroundings as possible, the animal had carefully sniffed every step leading up to the apartment, then submitted the mat in the vestibule to an even more scrupulous analysis, and was now moving slowly down the hallway, its nose still to the floor.

  “Ah, here you are at last,” Wilfrid said. “I wondered what had happened to you.”

  “He’s getting to know his new home, Papa,” Charles replied. He was in such a state of bliss that his face had taken on a positively angelic expression.

  They came into the kitchen. As though realizing that all this sniffing could be getting on someone’s nerves, the spaniel wisely decided to postpone studying the floor and curled up in the corner.

  Sylvie, who was sitting at the table drinking a beer, looked at the dog for a moment and then ground her cigarette out in the ashtray: �
��It’s just a pup, for Chrissakes. Male or female?”

  “Male,” Charles said without hesitation. “He’s a good dog.”

  She got up and went over to look at it more closely.

  “Strange,” she said. “He’s got one ear smaller than the other. He must have lost part of it in a fight or something.”

  She bent down a little closer.

  “And he stinks.”

  “He can be washed,” Wilfrid said. “That’s what running water’s for.”

  Charles looked up at his father gratefully.

  “Has it got a name?” Sylvie asked.

  “I just call him the spaniel,” said Charles. “That’s what I was calling him until …”

  The carpenter, eager to make up with his partner, put a hand on Sylvie’s arm: “Any suggestions?” he asked her.

  “Boff! How should I know?” Sylvie said, shrugging her shoulders and returning to her beer.

  “Boff!” cried Charles, overjoyed. “That’s a great name for him. We’ll call him Boff.”

  He ran over to the dog, drowning it in a tidal wave of hugs and kisses that brought a smile even to Sylvie’s bored face.

  “From now on you’re my Boff, do you understand? The only Boff in the whole world, the most beautiful dog of all dogs. I’m going to take good care of you always, you’ll never be cold or hungry again, you’ll have a roof over your head every night, this one, right here, 1970 rue Dufresne, remember that address. But you must be a good dog, eh? You mustn’t ever break anything or tear anything up, and no barking at anything or disturbing people, or else you’ll be in big trouble, understand?”

  Boff wagged his tail lightly, making what he could of Charles’s welcoming torrent of words; then he ran his tongue two or three times along Charles’s face to let him know that he accepted the conditions the boy had laid out, whatever they were.

  “Okay, that’s all well and good,” Sylvie intervened. “But he still stinks, that Boff of yours.”

  They took the dog into the bathroom and, despite its vigorous protests, placed it in the tub and gave it a full bath – using brush, soap, shampoo, and even some of Wilfrid’s aftershave (Charles thought it would be a good way to cover up some of Boff’s lingering odours). After the first bath, the water was almost black; after the second it was a dark brown; finally it turned a light blond, the colour of apple juice, and the tub blocked when they drained it; Wilfrid, armed with a toilet plunger, had to expend energy equal to at least two bottles of beer to unplug it. Meanwhile the dog, having submitted to a rubbing from Charles that nearly tore its hair out by the roots, decided instead to shake itself dry, thereby showering the walls, floor, and occupants of the room with water.

  All during dinner the animal sat quietly in front of the refrigerator, despite its obvious interest in the hamburger patties on his hosts’ plates, which it betrayed by flaring its nostrils; it no doubt knew instinctively that a crucial stage in its life as a dog had just begun, and that its behaviour over the next few hours would determine its entire future.

  “He’ll sleep in the kitchen,” Wilfrid decided later that evening, and he placed an old blanket, folded in four, against the wall beside the fridge. “There you go, lie down!” he said.

  Boff obeyed, lying with its muzzle between its paws, letting out a deep sigh and looking up at the carpenter as if to say: “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  But when Wilfrid got up during the night to empty his bladder, he saw that the dog had left its blanket; it had gone to find Charles and was curled up at the boy’s feet, fast asleep.

  “Back in the kitchen with you, go on!” grumbled Wilfrid, grabbing the dog by the scruff of the neck.

  The dog crouched pitifully on its blanket. But in the morning it was back on Charles’s bed.

  “You stubborn son of a bitch!” Wilfrid shouted. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Sylvie appeared in the door, yawning. “What’s it to you if the dog wants to sleep with your son?” she said. “Lots of dogs do it and no one’s died yet.”

  “I’m the boss around here, and it’ll do what I tell it to do. If I want it to sleep in the kitchen then, goddamnit, it’s going to sleep in the kitchen.”

  “You’re not the dog’s boss,” Sylvie said, nodding towards Charles, who was sitting on his bed, legs dangling over the side, watching his father nervously. “He is. Who do you think’s been feeding him all these years?”

  “He doesn’t wake me up, Papa,” the boy said. “I didn’t even know he was in the bed with me. And he’s really clean. Now that we’ve given him a bath, he’s as clean as we are.”

  After a brief discussion, the carpenter was forced to beat a retreat. But he did so with an ill grace, harbouring a secret wish for revenge.

  As Wilfrid had hoped, the arrival of Boff lightened the atmosphere a bit, and Charles began to show some of his former spirit. His attitude towards Sylvie changed, too. Ever since their big fight the boy had hardly spoken to her, not so much out of sulkiness as from fear, since the terrible memory he retained of that incident filled him with dread that it would happen again; by limiting his contact with the waitress, he lessened the risk of another beating.

  However, at some point over the next few days he overheard a conversation between his father and Sylvie that made him realize that it had been she who had urged Wilfrid to get closer to his son; it was to her that, deep down, he owed Boff; she was the one who had defended the dog the morning after its arrival in the apartment. Charles could begin to think of her at times as an ally, if a somewhat unreliable one: the timid teaspoons of friendship that he began to offer her were tempered with large dollops of caution. As for his father, he had now learned once and for all that, happy or sad, strict or generous, Wilfrid was a man he had to be wary of, especially when he’d been drinking.

  Boff must have come to the same conclusion, after his own fashion. He behaved properly and quietly when the two adults were around, and was even friendly with them at times, but it was only to Charles that he gave his love. He followed the boy around as though his young master held the strings of his destiny in his hands; when Charles left him alone to play with his friends, he curled up on the boy’s bed and waited for him, or else lay in the backyard under the balcony, the picture of dejection, having apparently renounced his years of vagabondage.

  And so the months passed. Although he didn’t know it, a huge trial was in store for Boff.

  7

  In September 1973, Charles began attending Saint-Anselme Elementary School, on rue Rouen, along with Henri Fafard and dozens of other children from the neighbourhood. They went, gnawed by both fear and curiosity, strapped into their backpacks and torn between their desire to act like big kids and wishing they could be babies again in their mothers’ arms.

  Once he was over his fright (although it took a few days), Charles realized that his teacher, a tall, thin woman with enormous, dark-brown, horn-rimmed glasses, was not the terrible ogress she had first appeared to be, and – his second realization, equally pleasant – that learning how to print a’s and b’s and i’s and o’s was well within his intellectual capabilities, and could even be fun. It took him a little longer to appreciate another advantage of going to school: there, unlike at home, he was perfectly safe.

  Ginette Laramée’s diction may have been a tad high and mighty, and she definitely had mannerisms that grated on the more sensitive souls in her charge, but after twenty-five years of navigating through the turbulent seas of primary education she had not completely lost her unsatisfied instincts for maternal affection; she was an aging spinster who would have liked to have had children of her own, but consoled herself for her unfulfilled dreams and solitary life by pouring her energies into her profession, as a lover of horses pours himself into training; her love, if she was to be fulfilled by it, had therefore to be productive. A child who was a slow learner weighed on her heart, and the sight of a pretty face, if it were to give her real pleasure, needed to be accompanied by scholastic ac
complishment. Each child received a small gift from her on his or her birthday. She handed out unexpected hugs and kisses freely; they were given exuberantly, and if they were a bit bony and awkward they still never failed to bring a smile. No mother ever followed the course of an illness, be it ever so slight, with more anxious attention. And in her presence all stutterers, squinters, and bearers of birthmarks or other natural disfigurements were assured of protection from the mocking remarks of their cruel classmates.

  Over the years, the more difficult cases seemed to come her way; she wasn’t always successful with them, in which case you had to watch out for her moods. But most often the snake charmers, the bottom-feeders, and the little piranha-fish, all those who liked to sow chaos in their wakes, ended up behaving themselves like everyone else, because her classroom was conducted at a fast, precise clip that demanded and received attention and held any unruliness in total check. She had therefore earned a reputation as a kind of pedagogical magician. Her minimum requirements for getting through a day were as follows:

  1. Ten cups of tea (a kettle and hot plate were kept in a permanent state of readiness in a corner of the classroom, and it was highly recommended not to go near them);

  2. A half-hour walk in the fresh air every day at noon, in fair weather or foul.

  Mademoiselle Laramée was quick to notice how things were with Charles and conceived for him a strong and somewhat demanding affection, one that was something of a burden for the boy. With her encouragement, however, he began to show great progress. While his fellow pupils were still struggling with ba, be, bi, bo, bu, he was working on bat, bed, big, bog, and bug, looking ahead to ball, bell, bill, and bull, and even inching towards call and cocoa. While the others were snapping their pencil leads trying to twist the numerals 5 and 8 into shapes resembling pieces of tortured metal, Charles was already working on the fundamentals of addition.