Charles the Bold

by Yves Beauchemin

  “God put a good head on your shoulders,” Mademoiselle Laramée would tell him in a low voice, leaning over his desk. “You must thank Him and work hard to fill it up.”

  Two or three other pupils provided him with a certain amount of competition, but generally it was Charles who came out ahead. Henri knocked himself out trying to keep up, but was always a lesson or two behind his friend.

  Such circumstances could easily lead to jealousy, but not in this case. Ginette Laramée, pedagogical magician that she was, took great care to spread her praise and encouragement around the classroom as equitably as possible, so that at the end of the day each pupil was pleased with his or her own efforts, which made it almost impossible to be jealous of Charles’s.

  After several weeks of school, Charles’s soul underwent a delicious expansion. Far removed from the stifling, vaguely menacing atmosphere that prevailed at home, for a few hours a day he became once again the happy, high-spirited little boy he’d been when Alice was alive. His successes filled him with a sense of satisfaction that was as new as it was uplifting, although he quickly learned that in order for them to be accepted he would have to be modest about them – braggarts attracted only mockery and punches – and not only modest but also generous and useful, sometimes even flattering. He had to avoid being called a sissy; a certain roughness in his manner went a long way towards giving him a kind of cachet. It was also important to keep a healthy distance between himself and the teacher at all costs – he was always careful to keep his back to her – so as to avoid being labelled her pet, a disgrace from which it seemed no one ever recovered.

  Because of that, and also because he could never contain the extraordinary pleasure he felt at being in school, he became the class clown. Even in that he was more or less successful; grimaces and contortions when Mademoiselle Laramée’s back was turned, animal impersonations, pretended idiocy or deafness, and so on. Such goings-on required a great deal of skill, since Ginette Laramée had a sharp eye and a low tolerance for lapses in discipline. Sometimes, however, he made even her laugh, which made his indiscretions all the sweeter.

  One day, however, he stepped over the line, and the teacher, furious, shook him by one ear until it turned bright red, and tears came to his eyes.

  “You will stay in after school,” she told him. “You and I need to talk.”

  To save face he managed to give a little smirk of defiance, but inside he was shaking so badly he could hardly focus on what was left of the lesson.

  “If you continue to act up in class,” she warned him when the last pupil had left for the day, “I’m going to have to tell your mother.”

  “I don’t have a mother, Mademoiselle,” he said.

  “You don’t?”

  “She died. Three years ago.”

  “You poor child,” she murmured.

  Charles looked up at her, surprised by her tone. There was pity in it, but also a sort of judgment (or so it seemed to him), as though she’d just discovered he was lame or had wet his pants.

  She chided him a bit for his conduct, but gently, without conviction, as though the worst punishment he could receive had already been inflicted on him. Then she let him go.

  He left the school with head bowed, dragging his feet, overcome by dark thoughts. Once again, Alice’s death had come back to haunt him. Why did she have to leave him like this, he asked himself angrily. Caught between a father who didn’t love him and a woman who couldn’t care less if he were dead or alive? He was nothing but an orphan, a sort of walking disaster, who would never amount to anything because there was no one to help him along.

  When he got home, the apartment was empty. Sylvie was at the restaurant, where he would go later for dinner, and his father wouldn’t be home until later that night. But the happy, frenetic barking that came from the backyard told him that Boff was waiting for him.

  He ran outside and let the dog off his leash, and Boff jumped on him and licked him with all eighteen paws and twenty-eight tongues, exhilarated by the greatest happiness he had ever known. He had spent hours in solitude, beset by dark wings whirling above his head that had made him despair of ever again seeing his cherished master. Despite the hunger that was gnawing at his stomach, Charles decided not to go to the restaurant, where Rosalie would have set aside a glass of milk and two Vachon cakes for him; he didn’t want to see anyone, least of all Sylvie. Instead, he made himself a peanut-butter sandwich, part of which he gave to the dog.

  “Come on, Boff,” he called, running down the hallway, “let’s go outside and see what’s up.”

  There were no children in the street; Henri must have been doing his homework early so he could have the evening to himself, but Charles wasn’t in the mood to see him anyway. He wandered aimlessly about the neighbourhood, closely followed by Boff, who sniffed at everything with great interest. Eventually he found himself in front of his old daycare. The play area was empty, but he could hear children’s voices inside. He thought of going in to say hello to Mélanie, but he didn’t: she would probably find such a visit strange, and anyway he didn’t know what he would say to her.

  He quietly opened the gate and, staying close to the wall, turned towards the play area, most of which was behind the building. Suddenly he understood why his steps had brought him to this place.

  “Come here, Boff,” he murmured, turning towards the dog. “I want to show you something.”

  Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he quickly moved towards the old cherry tree. A small shed in which various play accessories were stored shielded him from view from the building. With Boff watching closely, he knelt down and gently stroked the ground between two large roots that ran along the surface.

  “Do you remember that little yellow dog I wanted to save a long time ago, when it was snowing? He was tired and sick and he couldn’t stop shaking because he was soaking wet. It was the first time I’d seen him. He was so sad-looking. He died shortly after that. I was very sad and I asked if we could bury him here, just under where my hand is. He’s right there, close to us. We can stay here for a while with him. Do you want to, Boff?”

  Charles sat down between the roots and crossed his legs; Boff quickly came over and licked his cheek, then lay down beside him, his tail thumping quietly against the ground in a regular rhythm.

  Suddenly Charles sensed a strange presence nearby, and a delicious feeling of peace came over him. He looked around and saw nothing out of the ordinary, but he knew that something was keeping him company, an invisible friend who had been waiting for him for a long time, and he knew it was the little yellow dog even though he had hardly known it, and despite the fact that its life had ended so soon after being brought in from the cold. But he realized, with a quiet sort of joy, that death had not completely separated them. He sat with his eyes half closed, Boff’s warm body pressed against his leg, Boff himself going to sleep, his muzzle flat on the ground, the breath coming through his nostrils ruffling a few dry blades of grass in front of him.

  “My little yellow dog,” Charles murmured after a moment, “I’ll come back to visit you often, I promise. Maybe you can tell me where Mama is?”

  Charles wasn’t the only one to suffer from bouts of sadness. Boff was subject to them as well. He had worries of his own, in a doggy sort of way. When his previous cruel and uncaring owners had abandoned him, they’d left him out in the cold, without food, alone and vulnerable to all the dangers that went with a nomadic, unprotected life. But although they didn’t know it, they had also given him a magnificent gift: his freedom. For a year he had lived a life of pain and misery, dirty, reduced to skin and bones, obsessed with finding food, the target of a myriad bites and kicks, cars lunging at him from out of nowhere, well-intentioned idiots chasing him in order to bring him to the pound (they even caught him once, but he made a miraculous get-away). But still, despite all that, he had had his liberty. The only rules he had to follow were those of caution. As long as he was careful he could go where he wanted a
nd do what he liked. Since coming to live with Charles, however, it was a whole new ball game.

  Nothing would ever make him leave Charles, who was the love of his life, the sole source of all his joy. Three squares a day and a warm place to sleep weren’t bad, either, not to mention the little metal tag around his neck that seemed to change the way people behaved towards him. But living in an apartment with only a small fenced-in yard behind it, after having known the freedom of wide open spaces, could make a day seem long! And on top of that he had to get used to other people’s schedules: for several weeks now Charles had been leaving him alone for hours while he went to that school of his, where no dog could follow. He’d tried it one morning, slipping out of the apartment when the door was partly open. All he’d got for his trouble was a sharp word from Charles and a clip on the head from Sylvie, who was furious at having to run down the street after him in her housecoat and slippers with the whole neighbourhood watching. When she caught up with him, she almost bumped into Monsieur Morin, an old regular at Chez Robert, who took two steps back, eyes widening, hands on his hips, nose in the air, and lips curled in disgust, as though to say: “Aha, taken to working the streets, now, have we?”

  “I’ll get you for this,” she’d hissed to the dog, dragging him up the stairs by the collar.

  On the landing she gave him such a sharp whack that he’d bitten his own tongue, then she shut him up in the kitchen; five minutes later, when she’d finished getting ready for work, she left to go to the restaurant.

  Boff circled the room, still in a foul mood. Someone had left a loaf of bread on the table in its plastic bag. He jumped up on a chair, pulled the bread off the table onto the floor, then shook it out of its bag and ate the whole thing. After that he felt heavy and uncomfortable, so he lay down on his blanket beside the refrigerator and had a long nap. When he woke up, he felt much perkier, but his honour was still outraged at the treatment he had received. Looking around, he sought a new outlet for his vengeance.

  There was a washer and dryer at the rear of the kitchen, beside the back door. The dryer door was wide open, and inside he could see a pile of clothing. Boff got up, put his head through the opening and brought out three pairs of boxer shorts, seven socks, two face cloths and a towel, each of which he meticulously tore to shreds; the only thing he left untouched was a sweater belonging to Charles.

  He was thirsty after his labours, so he drank some water from his bowl. Then he spied a magazine that had been left on the counter. With his paw he flicked it onto the floor and chewed it, slowly, reducing it to a pulp; he enjoyed the taste of coated paper and was sorry that there were no other magazines lying around. He thought of taking another nap, but the anger that his imprisonment stirred up in him continued to grind away at his molars. When Sylvie, taking advantage of a mid-afternoon lull, ran back to the apartment to change her stained blouse, he had attacked the bottom of the door that gave out onto the backyard and nearly chewed his way through it.

  Despite Charles’s worst fears, Wilfrid did not ban the dog from the house, nor did he talk of beating him; all things considered, he took it fairly calmly. He contented himself with grabbing the animal by both ears and staring into its eyes, muttering nasty threats, but that was all.

  It was Wilfrid’s pride that made him hold back his anger – after all, he was the one who had let the dog into the house in the first place. He also wanted to lay Sylvie’s pessimistic predictions to rest. Charles would have liked to think it was also partly out of love for him, too, that his father must have sensed that the boy would never have got over the dog’s loss.

  From that day on, however, whenever no one was home, Boff was confined to the small backyard, attached to a chain, the chain to the clothesline. The hardware-store owner Fafard very generously gave them an old doghouse that had been gathering dust in the back of his garage. Charles was given the task of putting the dog on the chain the first time. He made Boff sit down in front of the doghouse, attached the chain to his collar, and explained to him carefully that there could be no barking or else their days together were numbered.

  Boff listened, gently wagging his tail, then shook his head vigorously and sneezed twice, which Charles interpreted as a sign of agreement.

  After barking for a few minutes anyway (to save face), Boff decided it was time to chew on the corner of his house. But he soon stopped, no doubt thinking that if he totally destroyed it, it would be held against him. After a few days he had become philosophical about his lot. However, word of his new situation spread quickly among the other dogs in the neighbourhood. Since the far end of the yard was enclosed by a dilapidated fence that was full of holes, it was easy for the smallest dogs to squeeze under a half-nailed board in order to visit him, which Boff appreciated greatly; these marks of friendship, however, were small recompense for the absence of his young master. Weekends and the hour when Charles returned from school were for him times of the wildest happiness.

  Although Charles didn’t realize it at the time, the incident in the kitchen was the beginning of a long, hard-fought battle between Boff and Wilfrid, a conflict that would have memorable consequences for the boy’s future.

  Charles gobbled up school as though it were a bar of milk chocolate. One November morning, with a cup of tea in one hand and a cookie in the other, Mademoiselle Laramée declared to her colleagues in the staff room that Charles was the best student in her class, the best student she had had in a long time, and that with a bit of luck and a lot of guidance he could “go far.”

  “His only problem,” she said a little worriedly, “is that the rest of the class isn’t moving ahead fast enough for him. He could easily become bored. But I try to keep him busy.”

  From then on, whenever Charles was seen in the school corridors, he was favoured by well-wishing smiles from all the teachers, and even the occasional affectionate pat on the head or shoulder. He felt a great deal of respect coming his way, and even began to consider himself as someone important enough to deserve it. He took care to hide these attentions from the other pupils, since despite his efforts to be accommodating and good company with his friends, he sometimes saw the glint of jealousy in their eyes.

  One afternoon after school, when Charles and Henri had gone to see the huge Frontenac Towers construction project on rue Bercy, Fats Dubé, who was famous in the class for his ability to fart on demand, as well as for his total uselessness at anything else, came up to Charles with a smirk, after exchanging significant glances with two of his friends.

  “Hey, Thibodeau,” he said, “what did you get in dictation this morning?”

  “Nine out of ten,” Charles replied, then ill-advisedly added: “I came first.”

  “Oh, wow,” said Fats Dubé’s two companions, mockingly. “Aren’t you the cat’s ass!”

  Henri, who sensed something ominous in the air, gave Charles a discreet poke in the ribs to let him know it was time to leave. But Fats Dubé planted himself in front of Charles.

  “You know why he’s so smart?” Fats asked, looking Charles straight in the eye with a sardonic smile. “It’s because he’s a queer. Queers always do good in school. Don’t they, Thibodeau?”

  Charles had only a vague idea of what he had just been called might mean, but he knew it was something outrageous, and his face tightened with anger.

  “What have I done to you, you big tub of lard? Why don’t you go home and let your mother change your diapers?”

  Fats threw himself on Charles, and the two of them rolled around on the sidewalk. His two friends charged Henri at the same time; one of them soon fell back, holding his stomach with both hands (Henri was known for his wicked kick); the other, alarmed, beat a hasty retreat, but when he saw a broken tree branch on the ground, he picked it up and returned to the fray.

  “Aha, so you want to fight dirty, eh!” cried Henri, who loved a good battle.

  He charged the boy with a wild cry; the branch struck him on the shoulder but, ignoring the pain, he let fly a punch that cau
ght his assailant so squarely in the eye it made him drop his weapon and suddenly think of a very important thing he had to do somewhere else.

  Charles, meanwhile, was huffing and puffing beneath his potbellied adversary, who was using his bulk to keep him flat on the ground while he shouted curses at him and dug his thumbs into his eyes. Charles succeeded in freeing one arm and was valiantly trying to tear off one of Fats’s ears when Henri ran up with the branch and, inserting it between Fats’s back and his school bag, used it as a lever to pry the bully off Charles. The battle was over.

  When Rosalie saw Charles through the window of the restaurant, she ran out immediately.

  “What in the world happened to you, you poor thing? It looks like you’ve gone through a snowblower! Have you been in a fight or something?”

  “I didn’t start it,” Charles said, tearfully.

  She brought him inside and took him into the washroom, where she gave him a quick wash and put a Band-Aid on his elbow.

  “Gracious God in Heaven! And here was me thinking you were such a quiet little boy. Just look at you!”

  “I am a quiet little boy,” Charles sobbed. “Fats Dubé picked on me for nothing. I never did anything!”

  Sylvie, who was busy serving a customer, merely wrinkled her eyebrows and went on with her work.

  “Go home and change,” she told him when he came back into the dining room. “Look at your sweater, it’s torn. We’ll have to throw it out. I’m ashamed of you. I can’t wait to see what your father’s going to say when he sees that.”

  Since Charles had been going to school Rosalie’s affection for him had blossomed into a deep admiration. The boy came to the restaurant every day after school for his supper, and would sit at an empty table to do his homework or go over his lessons. Rosalie had always wished she had “learned how to write better,” and blamed her parents for not making her study harder “when it would’ve made a difference.” At first she thought he was rushing through his work so as to get outside quickly to play with Boff and Henri, but one night she sat next to him and watched what he was doing. The beauty of his handwriting, the ease with which he read his lessons, his skill at addition and subtraction (a skill that even at her age required a great deal of concentration) plunged her into a bottomless well of wonderment.