“The hell they did!” Frenette said.
“Yeh,” the hired man went on, “and Etienne’s old woman screeching like a wildcat and the soldiers, the bastards, talking about a warrant. They took Napoléon right out in his drawers.”
“Tabernacle!” shouted Frenette, waving his arms about.
“The old woman couldn’t get over that. The kid dragged out in his drawers. She had Napoléon’s other pair in the wash and he was dragged out in his old ones. That’s what bothered her.”
Frenette banged his fist down on the counter and began to shout. In his lumber-camp days he had been a dangerous man on a Saturday night. He still liked to fight after he had a few whiskey blanc if he could find anyone to stand up to him. “Just let the English come here!” he kept saying. “Let them see what happens if they try to get me!”
“Well,” the farmer said, “there’s nothing Etienne can do now. They got Napoléon in uniform already, sure enough.”
“All you bastards,” Frenette said, “you sit around here saying there’s nothing to do now. We’ll find something to do!”
Drouin leaned a little further over the counter. “Mr. Tallard can do something, maybe?”
He looked around for Paul and when he found him he stopped. The boy had moved quietly away from the counter when the two strange men came in. In the middle of the floor was a model Percheron stallion. It stood there lifesize with a whole set of harness on its back. Drouin had got it cheap at a fire sale in Sainte-Justine. He was very proud of it and thought it more handsome than a statue in the church. Paul began to finger the harness while his ears listened. It was not the first time men in the store had begun to talk about his father and then stopped abruptly when they remembered he was there.
Frenette said, “Listen, Paul–what about your brother? Is this true what I hear, that Marius goes into the army soon?”
Drouin coughed but Frenette paid no attention. Paul came shyly out from behind the horse. “Marius is in college,” he said.
“Sure, sure,” Frenette said. “But just the same…”
“Heh,” Drouin said. “You think Mr. Tallard will stand for it if they put the conscription onto his own son?” He spread his hands as though he were measuring cloth. “You can push Mr. Tallard just so far.” He showed how far with his hands. “Then you better watch out!”
Suddenly Ovide Bissonette, on the overalls table, woke up. “What’s that you say?” he squeaked in a high, cracked voice. “What about Mr. Tallard?”
Paul looked at him in fascination. Everyone knew that Ovide was crazy. Years ago he had been a trapper in the far north and the men said the loneliness had touched his head. Now he did nothing but loaf around the store, and on Monday mornings he was supposed to sweep the burnt matches off the steps of the church. Sometimes he took out his beads in the store to tell them, no matter what was going on, but generally he slept on the overalls table with his eyes wide open. Now he pointed a scrawny hand at the group of men in front of the counter. “Mr. Tallard, he goes to hell maybe. But his wife, she goes for sure.”
“Shut up,” Drouin said. He grinned at Paul and revolved a finger at his temple. “You don’t mind him, Paul. He don’t know what he says.”
But Paul did mind just the same. The priest had told him all about hell and how the fire was real except that it replenished the flesh the instant it burned it off so the burning went on forever. He wished Captain Yardley would come. Again he retreated behind the horse, hoping the men would forget about him. He occupied himself with an examination of the farm tools racked on that side of the store. There were rakes, axes, hatchets, hoes, spades, scythes, and even trowels. He picked up an adze. Captain Yardley was wonderful with an adze. He had watched him use one to shape the keel of the ship he had made.
In front of the counter the men were still talking. “The war ought to stop,” one said.
“Sure.”
“Look at Mrs. Pitre of the back concession.”
“What about her?”
“Before the war she had seven children and they all lived. Since the war she’s had three and they all died. The war ought to stop.”
“The trouble with the English is they got no moderation,” Drouin said. “Now me, I’m behind the war all right, only not too much.”
Paul went to the window and looked out again. This time he saw Captain Yardley coming down the road, moving with his bobbing limp. He went to the door and waited for him. When John Yardley entered the store with the boy at his side he greeted the group of men amiably and asked for his mail. Drouin handed over a letter and a newspaper and said politely, “The news looks not so good today, eh, Captain?”
Yardley passed his eyes over the headlines of the Gazette and his lips tightened as he read.
“Looks like we lose the war, eh, Captain?” Frenette said.
Yardley shook his head. “That’s one thing you’re wrong about.”
“A lot of other people got different ideas maybe.”
Yardley looked at the blacksmith and then he grinned. He began to talk fast in his bad French. “Now you listen, Alcide. You fellas around here are just trying to get me sore, talking thet way. You know goddam well we don’t lost this war, and you know you don’t want to lose it, either.”
Frenette grinned. From any other Englishman he would not have taken Yardley’s words. But he knew the captain well by now and liked him and that made the difference. Yardley simply took it for granted that he was liked.
“I never said I wanted to lose the war, Captain. No. But you tell me what difference it makes if we do.”
“I’ll tell you,” the farmer said. He did not know Yardley well and regarded him as a complete foreigner. “You listen and I’ll tell you.”
“All right,” Yardley said. “Go ahead.”
“Right now in the winters,” the farmer said, choosing his words slowly, “me and the kid, we go north to saw wood for the English lumber company. Him on one end of the cross-cut saw and me on the other, we saw wood for the English.”
“You mean, you saw it for a dollar-fifty a day,” Drouin said.
The farmer’s sharp, chewing voice went right on, paying no attention to the interruption. “Now suppose we win the war. What happens? Me and the kid, we go on sawing the wood, same as now.” He paused and then went on. “But suppose we lose it? Maybe I keep on sawing, same as before. But goddam it, this time I got an Englishman on the other end of that saw, for sure.”
Yardley grinned and the other men guffawed. “I don’t blame you fellas for how you feel,” the captain said. “Guess I’d feel the same way if I was you. Only I’m not, so I don’t.”
He started for the door and Paul followed him outside, the store silent behind them. Yardley looked at the clouds blowing through the sky and smelled the earth and wished it were not earth he was smelling but salt water. He hungered for a smell of the sea. One thing he had never grown accustomed to in Quebec was the way the weather jumped about. Down in Nova Scotia you could tell a change of weather hours ahead. All you had to do was look at a pennant on a masthead or the drift of chimney smoke and gauge the wind, and then you knew. Up here even a barometer fooled you.
He said to Paul, “Two months more and we’ll all go fishing. You and me and Daphne and Heather. My granddaughters. They’re coming out to visit me.”
Paul’s dark, grave face did not alter expression. “P’pa says no.”
“He forgets how old you are. When I was your age I was bait-boy.”
“What’s that?”
“We used to go out in big yellow dories, myself and some men in sweaters and oilskins and sou’westers, and we’d go after the cod off the ledges. I’d keep the lines baited while the men fished. Clams, I used. Why sure–you’re old enough to row a boat all by yourself.”
Paul felt better. Anything was all right if the captain said so.
They had left the houses of the village behind and the wind was so strong Paul’s cap nearly blew off. “Captain Yardley…” he began, tr
ying to hold the cap with one hand and his father’s papers with the other. When he said nothing more the man looked down and saw that the boy was worried about something. He seemed to be sealing himself away into his worry, wanting to be coaxed, with a child’s caution wanting to make sure he was safe before he said anything about his troubles.
“Go ahead, Paul. You know you can talk to me about anything’s on your mind.”
They walked on in silence for a while, and then Paul said, “They were saying something in the store about Marius. About Papa and Marius.”
“Well.–I guess thet’s nothing new.”
“Will Marius have to be a soldier?”
“Lots of men are, these days. It’s not so bad, being a soldier.”
He quickened his pace, feeling something of the boy’s nameless apprehension. There had been a small but noticeable rise in feeling against Athanase in the village lately. It would come into the open if Marius were conscripted. Even Yardley could see that Athanase’s stand on the war was not understood here at all. If Marius were conscripted and his father did nothing to keep him out of the army, it would appear to the parish that Athanase was deserting his own family, and that was an unforgivable sin. Yardley preferred not to talk to Paul about Marius. He had met the elder Tallard son only once, but it was long enough to realize that he was one of the few people he knew who would not let himself be liked. Marius seemed to Yardley to be the mathematical product of the conflict within the country and also within his own family.
“Gosh, but Marius hates the English!” Paul said. “That’s why he hates Mother.”
“Go easy there, Paul. He don’t hate your mother.”
“Oh, yes, he does. I know. I think he hates P’pa, too, only he’s afraid of P’pa. Captain Yardley?”
“Yes?”
“Will Marius kill an Englishman if they try to put him in the army?”
“He wouldn’t know how.”
“Is it hard to kill someone?”
“Well, you got to know how to go about it.”
“Did you ever kill anyone, Captain Yardley?”
“Never did. But thet nigger I shipped with out east–I saw him kill a fella once.”
Paul stopped in the middle of the road. “How?”
Yardley felt better with the talk off the Tallard family. “Well, this nigger had the biggest moustache I ever saw. It was so long thet when he went to sleep he used to pass the ends of it behind his ears and make them fast with a reef knot, end to end behind his head. Otherwise it was always ketching into things when he was sleeping in his hammock. Well, one night–”
Paul was suspicious. “A negro with a moustache?”
“Thet’s what I’m telling you.”
The boy’s laughter bubbled. “But negroes don’t have moustaches, Captain Yardley. Not black negroes. I read that in a book. Was this a black negro?”
“Black? Say, thet fella down in the hold on a dark night was so black it’s a fact not even the ship’s cat could see him. Well, anyhow, one time a dirty little dago lad we had on board, he took out his knife and slit the nigger’s moustache off on one end, and when the nigger woke up to stand his watch, feeling around to untie the knot, he found he had only half a moustache and he let out a yell. Man, did thet black man know how to holler! Seven years growing, thet hair was.” Yardley looked down at the boy, grinning. “Well, when he saw this dago lad laughing at him, before anyone could stop him, he jumped the dago, and the skipper heard his neck crack clear above the hatches.”
Paul laughed because the story had no sense of disaster the way Captain Yardley told it. He started to test its veracity by asking more questions, and then he saw Father Beaubien coming down the road toward them. His black soutane was flapping in the wind and the pendant cross swayed across his lean stomach. As they passed, Yardley greeted him and Father Beaubien nodded briefly, holding back his smile.
When they were well out of earshot, Paul said, “Last week in the store I heard somebody say that Father Beaubien doesn’t like P’pa.”
Yardley laughed to hide a recurrent uneasiness. “They meant it was me he don’t like.”
“They said P’pa.”
“They meant me.”
“But why?” Paul was very serious. “Everyone likes you.”
“Well, I guess Father Beaubien don’t think he can afford to approve of me. You see, Paul, I’m a Presbyterian. It’s a hard thing to get used to, being disapproved of for being a Presbyterian.”
“Would I like it, being a Presbyterian?”
“Well,” Yardley said, “thet’s hardly a thing people like. It’s something a man hasn’t got any choice of.”
They were now well out on the river road and the wind from the north rushed past them in raw gusts. The river was ruffled by waves blowing across the current.
“Captain Yardley,” Paul said, “do you like Montreal?”
“No. I can’t say I do. Why?”
“M’ma does. She wants to go back to live there.”
Yardley made no reply.
“When I’m a man I’m going to see all the cities,” Paul said. “I’m going to sea, like you did. I’m going to see the places where Ulysses was.”
Older people always make a mistake with children that age, Yardley thought. They consider them babies. Paul remembered everything he read or saw in books, and everything he heard. Yardley had decided that at Paul’s age a human being generally knew at least nine-tenths of all he would ever know.
Paul was happy now as they walked along, thinking about the Odyssey. He wanted to see the place where the salt water was azure blue the way pictures showed it, and the men had straight noses and the women wore flowing robes. He thought of Ulysses tied to the mast, and the sailors with wax in their ears rowing him past the island where beautiful women, white-skinned and black-haired like his mother, sang over a heap of bones. That was a very sensible thing Ulysses had done with the wax. And on the other side of that sea there was the Holy Land where Christ was born. Paul thought it must be very gloomy there. He looked up out of his thoughts and his lips moved in a smile. He was happy at that moment, without knowing or thinking why.
When they reached Yardley’s gate, the captain said, “You’d better run along home with those papers. Your father will be sore enough to whale us, the way we’ve kept him waiting. Soon as the weather turns and it gets warm–you and me, we’ll have a summerful of fun.”
“That will be wonderful!” Paul said. He touched his cap gravely and went on home.
Yardley stood and watched the boy go off down the road, growing smaller in the flatness against the outline of bare trees tossing wildly in the wind. A sense of poignancy, of the beauty of things which derive their loveliness from their fragility, broke over him in a wave, surprising him with its contradiction of his own basic optimism. Yes, everything would be truly wonderful, even growing old till you were like a sun-bleached hulk would be good if you could be always among people who knew no fear. Among people who never groped at their neighbours like blind men in a cave. In a world where thoughts of war never stabbed into your personal peace like a needle.
Though Yardley had never had an academic education, he had slowly learned how to read books and how to think. As a sailor, and then as a ship’s master, he had known solitude in strange places. He was persuaded that all knowledge is like a painted curtain hung across the door of the mind to conceal from it a mystery so darkly suggestive that no one can face it alone for long. Of ultimate solitude he had no fear, for he never let himself think about it. But he knew that if he once started, fear would be there.
Once in the tropics he had moored his ship in the lee of a promontory hundreds of miles from any charted habitation. Through a whole afternoon he had waited while some of the crew went ashore under the second mate to look for water. Leaning over the taffrail he had watched the fish gliding through ten fathoms of sunlit water below. Sharks and barracuda moved in their three-dimensional element, self-centred, beautiful, dangerous and comp
letely aimless, coming out from a water-filled cavern hidden beneath the promontory and slipping under the ship’s keel, fanning themselves for seconds under the rudder, then circling back into the cavern again. A moment he saw them in the golden water and then they were gone, and the water was as if they had never been there. The first mate had come to him for an order and broken his contemplation, but the memory of the hour had never left him. Self-centred, beautiful, dangerous and aimless: that was how they had been, and he could never forget it.
Here in Saint-Marc, where he had planted himself of his own volition, he had been lonely. He had come to love young Paul as though the boy were his own son. And he knew they would all fight over him yet. The obscure conflict within the Tallard family would certainly centre on this youngest member. Beyond that, the constant tug of war between the races and creeds in the country itself would hardly miss him, for people seemed so constructed that they were unable to use ideas as instruments to discover truth, but waved them instead like flags.
As Yardley limped up the path to his house his mind saw a vision of all the Tallards pulling Paul; Marius on one arm and his mother on the other, Athanase at the head, and the priest with his powerful hands on both feet. He smiled to himself, deciding that the image was nonsense. A windy day was always a bad time to start figuring things out, especially if a man had been too much alone.
He closed the door on the day and threw some logs on the fire. Then he went into his kitchen to heat a bowl of soup and cut a slice of bread for his lunch.
EIGHT
The two parlour cars on the early afternoon train from Ottawa to Montreal were filled with politicians and lobbyists on their way home for the weekend, and Athanase Tallard was among them. On his knees were two newspapers, one French, the other English. He had read each of them through once. For a while he sat quietly, occasionally looking out the windows, then he opened the French paper, turned to the editorial page and re-read what the editor had to say about the speech he had made in the House the previous afternoon.
“The career of M. Athanase Tallard is excellent proof that no man can run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” it said. “At least not in the province of Quebec. In the first half of his latest speech he tells us that the rest of the country does not understand Quebec. In the last half he talks about conscription like a Toronto jingo. As spokesman for French-Canada, he has completely discredited himself. Your protestations, M. Tallard, deceive no one but yourself. You can be with us, or you can be against us. You cannot stand in the middle, supporting the English Imperialists with one hand and trying to appease us with the other.”
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