“Well, your other choice is to send innocent people to jail,” Moss answered. “How do you like that?”
“I don’t, much,” the Canadian answered. “But I thought it was what you Yanks call justice. Sure has looked like that since you came.”
“You shouldn’t blame him,” Eddie said. “He’s done everything he could for us, ever since he hung out his shingle here.”
“That’s so,” the waiter admitted, and Moss felt good till the fellow added, “Sure as hell wish he could do a lot more, though.”
Lucien Galtier sighed as he and Marie and Georges and Jeanne—the last two children left at home—got into his Chevrolet for the Sunday trip to Rivière-du-Loup. “I’d sooner go to Mass in St.-Antonin or St.-Modèste,” he said, “but sometimes there’s no help for it.”
“Doing this is wise,” his wife said. “As long as we come to church every so often and let Bishop Pascal see us, everything should be fine.”
“We don’t want to give him any reason to complain about us to the Americans, no,” Lucien agreed.
“But the Republic of Quebec is free and independent,” Georges said. “And if you don’t believe me, just ask the first American soldier you see.”
Georges always liked to sound as if he were joking. Sometimes he was. Sometimes . . . Lucien had learned an English expression: kidding on the square. That summed things up better than anything in Quebecois French.
“You’re getting pretty good at this driving business,” Georges went on as they rolled up the paved road past the hospital and toward the town on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. “Anyone would think you’d been doing it all your life.” He chuckled. “They’d hardly even invented horses when you were a boy, eh, Papa, let alone motorcars?”
“They hadn’t invented such smart alecks, I’ll tell you that,” Lucien said. His younger son preened, as if at praise.
The Église Saint-Patrice in Rivière-du-Loup was called a cathedral these days, though it was the same building it had always been. Quite a few motorcars parked nearby. Times were . . . Lucien wouldn’t say they were good, but he thought it now and again.
As people filed into the church (being the stubborn Quebecois farmer he was, Galtier refused to think of it as a cathedral, no matter what Bishop Pascal declared), some of them talked about the stocks they’d bought, and about how much money they’d made from them. Lucien felt Marie’s eyes on him. Ever so slightly, he shook his head. He’d stayed away from the bourse, and intended to go right on staying away from it. It struck him as being much more like gambling than any legitimate way to make money. Gambling, now, gambling was all very well—so long as you knew you could lose as easily as you could win.
He was almost to the door when he heard the word scandal for the first time. Now he and his wife looked at each other. He shrugged. Marie did the same. A moment later, he heard the word again. Something juicy had happened. And I’ve been on the farm minding my own business, and so I haven’t the faintest idea what it is, he thought regretfully.
“Tabernac,” he muttered. The look Marie sent him this time was definitely reproachful. He pretended not to notice. It wasn’t—quite—as if he’d cursed on holy ground. The other side of the door, it would have been a different business.
No sooner had he gone inside than someone else—a woman—said scandal, and immediately started giggling. “What’s going on, mon père?” Georges asked. Scandal—especially scandal that might be funny—drew him the way maple syrup drew ants.
A young priest named Father Guillaume stood by the altar in Bishop Pascal’s place. As Lucien took his seat in the pews, he asked the fellow next to him, a townsman, “Where’s the bishop?”
“Why, with the children, of course,” the man answered, and started to laugh. Lucien fumed. He didn’t want to admit he didn’t know what was going on. That would make him look like a farmer who came to town only to sell things and to hear Mass. Of course, he was a farmer who came to town only to sell things and to hear Mass, but he didn’t want to remind the world of it.
His eldest daughter, Nicole; her husband, the American doctor named Leonard O’Doull; and their son, Lucien, sat down behind his family. He started to lean back and ask them what was so delicious, but Father Guillaume began speaking in Latin just then, so he had to compose himself in patience.
He dared hope the priest’s sermon would enlighten him, but it only left him more tantalized and titillated than ever. Father Guillaume talked about those without sin casting the first stone. He praised Pascal, and wished him good fortune in whatever he chose to do with the rest of his life.
Lucien wiggled like a man with a dreadful and embarrassing itch. What ever the scandal was, it must have got Bishop Pascal! He’d never cared for Pascal; the man was too pink, too clever, too . . . too expedient, to suit him. But Pascal had always come up smelling like a rose—till now. And I don’t even know what he did! Galtier thought in an agony of frustration.
He went up and took communion from Father Guillaume. He swallowed the wafer as fast as he could; he didn’t want to speak of scandal with the Body of Christ still on his tongue. But then he made a beeline for his son-in-law.
“What? You don’t know? Oh, for heaven’s sake?” Dr. O’Doull exclaimed. He’d come to Quebec during the war, speaking tolerably good Parisian French. After ten years here, his accent remained noticeable, but only a little. He sounded more as if he’d been born in la belle province—la belle république, now—every day.
“No, I don’t know,” Galtier ground out. “Since you are such a font of knowledge, suppose you enlighten me.”
“Mais certainement, mon beau-père,” O’Doull said, grinning. “Bishop Pascal’s lady friend just had twins.”
“Twins!” Lucien said. “Le bon Dieu!”
“God was indeed good to Bishop Pascal, wouldn’t you agree?” his son-in-law said, and laughed out loud. “I should say, to former Bishop Pascal, for he has resigned his see in light of this . . . interesting development. Father Guillaume will serve the spiritual needs of Rivière-du-Loup until the see has a new bishop.”
“Twins,” Galtier repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before. “Yes, I can see how he would have to resign after that.”
No one was surprised when priests had lady friends. They were men of the cloth, yes, but they were also men. A lot of women, down through the years, had sighed over Father, later Bishop, Pascal. Lucien didn’t understand it, but he’d never been a woman, either. And few people were astonished if the lady friends of priests sometimes presented them with offspring. That, too, was just one of those things. Life went on, people looked the other way, and the little bastards were often very well brought up.
“But twins!” Lucien said. “You can’t look the other way at twins. By the nature of things, a bishop’s twins are a scandal.”
“Exactly so, mon beau-père,” Leonard O’Doull said. “And that is why Bishop Pascal is Bishop Pascal no more, but plain old Pascal Talon.”
“Pascal Talon!” Galtier exclaimed. “That’s right—that is his family. I hadn’t thought of his family name in years, though. No one has, I’m sure.”
“Of course not, not when he belonged to the Church for all those years,” Dr. O’Doull said. “That’s what belonging to the Church means. That’s what it does. It takes you away from your family and puts you in God’s family.” He laughed again. “But, now that he’s gone and made God’s family bigger . . .”
Galtier laughed, too. He asked, “Since you are in town and hear all these things the moment they happen—and since you don’t bother telling your poor country cousins about them—could you tell me what M. Pascal Talon plans to do now that he is Bishop Pascal no more?” Whatever it was, he had the nasty feeling the man would make a great success of it.
And, sure enough, his son-in-law said, “I understand he’s decided Rivière-du-Loup is too small a place for a man of his many talents. He will be moving to Quebec City, they say, where he can be appreciated for everyth
ing he is.”
A snake, a sneak, a worm, a collaborator, a philanderer—yes, in the capital of the Republic he should do well for himself, Galtier thought. He found some more questions: “And what of the twins? Are they boys or girls, by the way? And what of their mother? Is Pascal now a married man?”
“They’re a boy and a girl. Very pretty babies—I’ve seen them,” O’Doull replied. Being a doctor, he’d seen a lot of babies. If he said they were pretty, Lucien was prepared to believe him. He went on, “I am given to understand that Suzette is now Mme. Talon, yes, but I don’t think she’ll be going to Quebec City with her new husband.”
Marie heard that and let out a loud sniff. “He made himself a member of God’s family. If he cheated on his vows to the Lord, how can anyone think he won’t cheat on his vows to a woman? Poor Suzette.”
“Yes, very likely Pascal will cheat on her, but she must have known he cheated when she first started her games with him,” Lucien said.
“Why do you always blame the woman?” his wife demanded.
“Why do you always blame the man?” he returned, also heatedly.
“Excuse me.” Dr. O’Doull made as if to duck. “I’m going somewhere safer—the trenches during the war were probably safer.”
“It will be all right,” Galtier said. “We’ve been married this long. We can probably last a little longer.”
Marie didn’t argue, but her expression was mutinously eloquent. And, as a matter of fact, Galtier wondered why he did take the former Bishop Pascal’s side. It wasn’t as if he liked the man. He never had. He’d never trusted him, either. Pascal had always been too smooth, too rosy, to be reliable. That was what Lucien had thought, at any rate. Plainly, a lot of people had had a different opinion.
But was Suzette, the new Mme. Talon, such a bargain? Galtier also had his doubts about that. After all, if she’d let Pascal into her bed, what did that say about her taste? Nothing good, certainly.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
“All right,” Marie answered. Her voice had no, We’ll come back to this later, in it, so he supposed this wouldn’t be a fight that clouded things between them for days at a time. They’d had a few of those, but only a few: one reason they still got on so well after thirty years and a bit more besides.
“Why do you dislike Bishop Pascal so much?” Jeanne asked on the way back to the farm.
“Well, just for starters, because he tried to get us to collaborate with the Americans during the war. And when we wouldn’t do it, he got them to take away our land and build the hospital on it,” Galtier replied. “You were just a little girl then, so you wouldn’t remember very well, but he alienated our patrimony.”
“But . . .” His youngest daughter seemed to have trouble putting her thoughts into words. At last, she said, “But my sister married an American. We’re paid rent, and a good one, for the land the hospital sits on.”
Georges laughed. “How do you answer that one, Papa?”
That was a good question. Galtier did the best he could, saying, “At the time, what Father Pascal did seemed wrong. It worked out for the best. I can’t quarrel with that. But just because it worked out for the best doesn’t mean Pascal did what he did for good reasons. He did what he did to grab with both hands.”
“Suppose the Americans had lost the war,” Marie added. “What would have happened to Pascal then?”
“He would have come out ahead of the game, and convinced everyone everything was somebody else’s fault,” Georges replied at once.
He was probably right, even if that wasn’t the answer his mother had been looking for. Lucien sighed. The farmhouse wasn’t far now. “Quebec City had better watch out,” he said, and drove on.
Sylvia Enos stood in the kitchen of her flat, glaring at her only son. She had to look up to glare at him. When had George, Jr., become taller than she? Some time when she wasn’t watching, surely. He looked unhappy now, twisting his cloth cap in his hands. “But, Ma,” he said, “it’s the best chance I’ll ever have!”
“Nonsense,” Sylvia told him. “The best chance you’ll ever have is to stay in school and get as much learning as you can.”
His face—achingly like his dead father’s, though he couldn’t raise a mustache and they were falling out of style anyhow—went closed and hard, suddenly a man’s face, and a stubborn man’s at that, not a boy’s. “I don’t care anything about school. I hate it. And I’m no . . . good in it anyhow.” He wouldn’t say damn, not in front of his mother. Sylvia had done her best to raise him right.
“You don’t want to go to sea at sixteen,” Sylvia said.
“Oh, yes, I do,” he said. “There’s nothing I want more.”
Till you meet a girl. Then you’ll find something you want more. But Sylvia didn’t say that. It wouldn’t have helped. What she did say was, “If you go to sea at sixteen, you’ll be doing it the rest of your life.”
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked. “What else am I going to be doing the rest of my life?”
“That’s why you go to school,” Sylvia said. “To find out what else you could be doing.”
“But I don’t want to do anything else,” George, Jr., said, exactly as his father might have. “I just want to go down to T Wharf and out to sea, the way Pop did.”
All the reasons he wanted to go to sea were all the reasons Sylvia wanted him to stay home. “Look what going to sea got your father in the end,” she said, fighting to hold back tears.
“That was the Navy, Ma.” Now George, Jr., just sounded impatient. “I’m not going into the Navy. I just want to catch fish.”
“Do you think nothing can go wrong when you’re out there in a fishing boat? If you do, you’d better think again, son. Plenty of boats go out from T Wharf and then don’t come home again. Storms, fog, who knows why? But they don’t. Even if they do come home, they don’t always bring back everybody who set out. If you’re tending a line or hauling in a net and a big wave comes by . . . Do you really want the crabs and the lobsters and the flatfish fighting over who gets a taste of you?”
Most fishermen had a horror of a watery death, and of the creatures they caught catching them. But her son only shrugged and answered, “If I’m dead, what difference does it make?” He was sixteen. He didn’t really think he could die. So many sailors had, but he wouldn’t. Just listening to him, Sylvia could tell he was sure of it.
With a sigh, she asked, “Well, what is this big chance you’re talking about, son?”
“I ran into Fred Butcher the other day, Ma,” George, Jr., said.
“He’s got fat the last few years, hasn’t he?” Sylvia said.
George Jr., grinned. “He sure has. But he’s got rich the last few years, too. He doesn’t put to sea any more, you know. He hires the men who do.”
“I know that.” Sylvia nodded. “He’s one of the lucky ones. There aren’t very many, you know.” Butcher wasn’t just lucky. He’d always driven himself like a dray horse, and he had a head for figures. Sylvia wished she could have said the same about her son. But, as he’d said himself, he didn’t like school, and he’d never been an outstanding scholar.
“I don’t care. I want to go to sea,” he said now. “And Mr. Butcher, he said he’d take me on for the Cuttlefish. She’s one of the new ones, Ma, one of the good ones. Diesel engine, electricity on board, a wireless set. A fishing run on a boat like that, it’s almost like staying ashore, it’s so comfy.”
Sylvia laughed in his face. He looked very offended. She didn’t care. “You tell me that after you’ve put to sea, and I’ll take you seriously. Till then . . .” She shook her head and laughed some more.
But she’d yielded ground, and her son took advantage of it. “Let me find out, then. I’ll tell you everything once I get back. Mr. Butcher, he says he’ll pay me like a regular sailor, not a first-timer, on account of he was friends with Pop.”
That was generous. Sylvia couldn’t deny it. She wished she could have, for she would. Tears came to
her eyes again. She was losing her little boy, and saw no way to escape it. There before her stood someone who wanted to be a man, and who was ever so close to getting what he wanted. She sighed. “All right, George. If that’s what you care to do, I don’t suppose I can stop you.”
His jaw dropped. Enough boy lingered in him to make him take his mother’s word very seriously. “Thank you! Oh, thank you!” he exclaimed, and gave Sylvia a hug that made her feel tiny and short. “I’ll work as hard as Pop did, I promise, and save my money, and . . . everything.” He ran out of promises and imagination at the same time.
“I hope it works out, George. I pray it works out.” When a tear slid down Sylvia’s face, her son looked alarmed. She waved him away. “You’re not going to get me not to worry, so don’t even try. I worried about your father every day he was at sea, and I’ll worry about you, too.”
“Everything will be fine, Ma.” George, Jr., spoke with the certainty inherent in sixteen. Sylvia remembered how she’d been when she was that age. And it was worse with boys. They thought they were stallions, and had to paw the ground with their hooves and neigh and rear and show the world how tough they were.
The world didn’t care. Most of them needed years to figure that out. Some never did figure it out. The world rolled over them either way: it ground them down and made them fit into their slots. If they wouldn’t grind down and wouldn’t fit, it broke them. Sylvia didn’t think it intended to. But what it intended and what happened were two different beasts.
It had rammed her into a slot, all right. Here she was, coming up on middle age, living from day to day, wondering how she’d get by, worrying because her only son was quitting school and taking up a dangerous trade. If there weren’t ten thousand others just like her in Boston, she’d have been astonished.
But then savage anger and pride shot through her. I killed the son of a bitch who sank the Ericsson. I shot him dead, and I’m walking around free. How many others can say the like? Not a one.
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