“You’re keeping something from me, son,” Monsieur Blondin pressed.
“No I’m not, Papa,” Blonblon replied, hurrying to finish his cereal so as not to give himself away. “It’s just that I have some homework to finish before going to school. Excuse me, I’ve got to go to my room.”
He got dressed, then sat down on the side of his bed to give the thing more thought. His mother might have been able to help him see the problem more clearly, but she was still sleeping. Her job as a real-estate agent often kept her out late at night.
Blonblon rubbed his feet together and frowned again, this time without trying to hide his agitation; he felt himself torn between two obligations: on the one hand was the promise he had made to Charles, and on the other, the sense that he had to intervene in order to save his friend from almost certain death, a danger of which Charles himself seemed entirely unaware.
He left his room, schoolbag on his back, hugged his father and headed off to school. Henri would probably already be in the schoolyard, since he always got there early. A thought quickened Blonblon’s step: maybe Charles had let Henri in on the secret. That would release Blonblon from his promise, and he would be free to save Charles’s life.
In the schoolyard he saw Henri playing ball-hockey with some friends; Charles was leaning against the fence, watching them but looking deep in thought. He turned towards Blonblon and waved his hand. Blonblon approached him, struck by the pale, exhausted look on Charles’s face.
“Where’s your hockey stick, Blondin?” Henri called over.
Charles merely gave him a sad, intent look, the kind spies gave to their contacts when they wanted to warn them about something. Henri noticed nothing, and went on playing hockey as though everything were normal.
Blonblon chatted with Charles about this and that until the bell went. But just as they were about to enter the school he managed to get beside Henri and give him a light elbow in the ribs.
“So?” he asked, giving his voice a mysterious cast.
“So what?” asked Henri.
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“Like what?”
Blonblon looked at him for a moment, then pointed a finger at his temple.
“Wheels grinding a bit slowly this morning, are they?” Then he shrugged: “Forget it,” he said, and moved off.
The problem tortured him throughout the morning. Madame Jacob told him three times to stop daydreaming, and the third time her admonition was accompanied by such a vigorous pinch on the arm that he cried out in pain, to the great enjoyment of the entire class. But at least the pain produced a salutary effect: his ideas quickly took shape in his mind and he finally was able to come to a decision. At noon, on his way home for lunch, he went by way of rue La Fontaine and stopped in at the hardware store owned by Fernand Fafard. Monsieur Fafard was deep in an impassioned conversation with a small man in a grey hat who was holding a huge catalogue in his hand, waving it about in front of him in a menacing way. For some time now tempers in Quebec had been flaring up, ever since rumours began spreading that the Bourassa government was going to call an election in order to block the rise of the Independence movement.
“Bourassa!” Fernand Fafard was saying in disgust. “Come on, Roland! He’s like an empty hand puppet! We’ll never get anywhere with him in power!”
“Farther than we’ll get with your Separatists! Lévesque and his bloody theories, he’s nothing but a Separatist and you know it!”
“You sound like Trudeau, Roland! Shame on you! All we want is to have control over our own affairs! You’d like that, wouldn’t you, to be able to control your own affairs? What would you say if I stuck my nose in your business, like the English in Ottawa have been doing to us since the very beginning?”
The argument escalated. The sales rep’s face became as red as the feather that adorned his hat band; Fernand’s face was an even darker crimson.
Suddenly both men became aware of Blonblon, whose feverish eyes had been on them for several long minutes.
“What can I do for you, my lad?” Fernand asked, trying with little success to separate himself from the vehemence that he felt.
“It’s about Charles Thibodeau, Monsieur Fafard.”
The child’s voice expressed such anguish that Fernand turned to his opponent. “You’ll have to excuse me, Roland: I’ve got to talk to this young lad. You’ll bring my order on Tuesday?”
He signalled to Blonblon to follow him into his office and, with his stomach churning from the passion of his speechifying, took his chair behind his desk and unscrewed the cap from a thermos bottle, from which arose the mouthwatering aroma of beef-and-carrot stew.
“Okay, so what’s happened?” he asked, spreading a napkin on his lap.
With his fork suspended in mid-air, Fernand listened to Blonblon with such a serious expression that Blonblon wondered if he had angered him.
“Well, to tell you the truth I’m not surprised,” Fernand said when the boy had finished. “A paring knife! The man’s crazy in the head! You did the right thing by coming to me, my friend. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
Satisfied, and with the smell of beef stew pricking his appetite, Blonblon hurried home. Meanwhile, after a long telephone conversation with his wife, Fernand called Parfait Michaud and asked the notary to come to meet him in his office as soon as possible.
“This is serious, very serious, much more so than I thought,” murmured Michaud, rubbing his chin. “The child is definitely in danger.”
“Let me get my hands on his father and he won’t be for long,” said Fernand, who had taken on a proud, military stance reminiscent of the Lambert Closse statue on the monument to de Maisonneuve in the Place d’Armes.
The two men went to call on Wilfrid Thibodeau. By chance, the carpenter was standing at his living-room window looking discreetly up and down the street before risking going out, and he saw the hardware-store owner and a stranger climbing his staircase. They were surely coming to talk about his son. Something serious must have happened. He felt obliged to let them in.
The meeting was brief. Fernand introduced the notary, who impressed Wilfrid greatly. Then Fernand said he knew the whole story of what had happened the other night, every horrific detail, and that he had taken the liberty of speaking about it with Parfait Michaud, whose opinion agreed perfectly with his own: Thibodeau was skating within a hair’s breadth of going to jail. His only hope to avoid it was to accept the proposition they were about to make and which he should look upon as an undeserved godsend.
Lucie had been urging Charles to come to stay with them for several weeks, and now Fernand was offering to raise the boy as his own until Charles reached the age of majority. And unless the child expressly asked, Thibodeau was not to try to see him. The carpenter was to sign a consent form to that effect, and furthermore would undertake, in writing, to give the Fafards a monthly sum of money for the boy’s upkeep, the exact amount to be adjusted according to the carpenter’s income. And finally, Charles was to get immediate possession of all his clothes and personal effects.
Wilfrid was in such a state of discomposure that he agreed to each term without a murmur, and even helped his neighbour gather Charles’s things together. His hands shook as he filled bags and cardboard boxes: two decampings in such short order seemed to have completely unnerved him.
Michaud, embarrassed by the proceedings, looked on in silence. He arranged with Thibodeau to come to his office the next day to sign the appropriate papers.
“Good luck, my dear sir,” he said, giving the man a stiff, formal bow.
Wilfrid merely stared at him with his mouth open.
“My dear Fafard,” Michaud said when the two men were back on the sidewalk, loaded down with bags and boxes, “you are a man of extraordinary generosity! I don’t know anyone like you. You should be made a saint.”
Fernand laughed, flattered. “What else could I do?” he said. “I had no choice! If I hadn’t done what I did, wha
t would become of Charles? One day we’d pick up a copy of the Journal de Montréal and there he would be, on the front page. That’s what would happen, my friend … Anyway, it wasn’t me so much as my wife. She’d’ve boxed my ears for the rest of my life! She loves that boy as if she’d carried him in her belly herself.”
Wilfrid did not show up at the notary’s office the next day. A few days later, Monsieur Victoire told Rosalie over his morning coffee that the carpenter had skipped out during the night without paying his rent. A few weeks later, Fernand heard from one of his suppliers that Thibodeau was working in a logging camp up on James Bay.
It would be a long time before Charles saw his father again.
For years, despite Premier Bourassa’s attempts to calm things down, Quebec had been in a state of agitation and turbulence. Bourassa was accused of being weak, but weakness was simply one of the masks he put on to hide his determination, which was unshakeable. In his view, the security of la Belle Province required that it remain part of Canada, under the control of the federal government in Ottawa. According to his adversaries, such a policy would keep the province standing in the wings of the stage of world history, and condemn it to perpetual decline.
Within days of Charles moving in with the Fafards, the government, worried by the inroads the sovereignty-association movement was making in the minds of the people, called an election. There followed one of the hardest-fought campaigns in the history of Quebec. Despite the protests of his wife and plain good business sense, Fernand had two gigantic Parti Québécois posters plastered across the front of his house, one with a photograph of René Lévesque, the other with one of Guy Bisaillon, who was running for the PQ in the riding of Sainte-Marie, where the Fafards lived. Lévesque criss-crossed the province talking tirelessly of the “normal country” his compatriots must seize for themselves or else risk losing their patrimony. Fernand wore out a pair of shoes going from door to door with Bisaillon, leaving the running of the store to Clément Labbé, his right-hand man, who was delighted to be given the opportunity to ask for a raise in salary at the end of the year. Despite her initial misgivings, Lucie spent several evenings a week in the candidate’s office, checking voters’ lists and taking phone calls; she also organized a series of kitchen meetings, inviting neighbours who she thought might be willing to discuss changing their allegiances. One of the meetings featured none other than Pierre Bourgault, the man with the white eyelashes and the acid tongue, who could lift a crowd as easily as others could lift a teaspoon.
Far from feeling left out, Charles was caught up in all the excitement, especially since it took his mind off the unpleasantness he had recently gone through. It also freed him from the pitying attentions the others had been lavishing on him.
On November 15, 1976, the Parti Québécois formed the new government, and a gust of fresh wind blew through Quebec. That night Fernand and Lucie took their children to the Paul Sauvé Arena, where a huge rally was taking place. Even though Charles went to bed very late that night, he still found it hard to sleep; his brain tingled with the sound of ovations, just as his stomach ached from too much potato chips and pop.
17
When subjected to a surfeit of sudden happiness, the mind can sometimes rebel, as though incapable of digesting too much change at one sitting. A daily portion of suffering eventually conditions those who are forced to undergo it; slowly, inevitably, pain becomes the medium through which the sufferer perceives life. Such is the strange and somewhat sad way that Nature, in its determination to endure, has found to withstand the vicissitudes of existence. Experts call it the adaptation instinct.
For several days, Charles felt like a prisoner who had been yanked from a dark, dank basement and thrust unceremoniously into the sunlight. His eyes blinked, his head spun, he couldn’t breathe the unaccustomed air, and he didn’t quite know where he was.
What a change he had undergone. He would suddenly find himself being hugged for no reason, he who had known so little gentleness since the death of his mother. The Fafards maintained a calm, safe, normal household, built on a foundation of good humour whether they were squabbling or simply discussing something animatedly. There was the assurance of three meals a day. The family displayed a friendly and affectionate interest in whatever he was doing (sometimes excessive and even a bit annoying). He had become a star. His mildest jokes were met with bursts of laughter. Every night Lucie or Fernand would help him with his homework; even Henri, ordinarily so wild and scatterbrained, gave him a disconcerting amount of attention. As for Céline, she was always beside him, smiling angelically. Even Boff got into the act: in an historically significant decision, Lucie disregarded her allergies and allowed the dog to spend nights in the house with Charles, and every evening the poor thing exhausted itself trying to show his master how overjoyed it was at this arrangement, to such an extent that getting undressed and into his pyjamas had become an arduous operation for Charles.
As in his previous home, Charles had his own room. Until his arrival it had been the guest room, but as though by a magic wand it had been transformed into his. Lucie had helped with the redecorating, using all the things Charles had brought with him. A framed photograph of Alice, smiling, sitting at a picnic table with a glass of lemonade, sat on a desk that Fernand had salvaged from the garage and on which Charles was supposed to do his homework (in fact he did it with Henri on the dining-room table); on one wall was a poster for Once Upon a Time in the West; a small bookshelf near the window had had its collection of Reader’s Digests removed to make room for Charles’s toys, including a magnificent firetruck with a moving extension ladder, a siren, and a searchlight, which his father and Sylvie had given him for his seventh birthday and which had miraculously survived two years of hard use; on the top shelf, in plain view, were the two volumes of Alice in Wonderland, the only things Boff was not allowed to sniff at nor even to approach. Simon the Bear was enthroned in one corner on a small chair to which had been added a blue cushion decorated with stars.
If Charles were asked what he’d been feeling since coming to live with the Fafards, all he would have been able to say was that he had never felt anything like it before. It almost made him feel bad to feel so good. Such a wealth of happiness sometimes made him anxious and uncomfortable; his first night in his new room he had cried bitterly without really knowing why, and the presence of Boff – a somewhat astonished Boff, for obvious reasons – had been extremely precious.
He might have been expected to be calmer in school, more attentive, but in fact he was the opposite. His joy was so intense, so new, he had no way of knowing how to contain it, and it seemed to make him as fidgety as his former unhappiness had. He laughed at everything and anything, played the clown more than ever, concentrated on nothing for more than three minutes at a time, and shot into raging fits of inexplicable anger that took everyone by surprise. One day he entertained himself by dumping a garbage pail into one of the bathroom toilets! The toilet flooded, a plumber had to be called in, and Charles, thanks to an informer, received two weeks of detentions. In desperation, Madame Jacob scolded and pinched him mercilessly, and ended up writing him off as a deeply disturbed idiot. It would take him a long time to disabuse her of that notion.
Wilfrid’s disappearance didn’t seem to have affected him at all, but in fact he went to great lengths to hide his shame. He never mentioned his father and did not like anyone speaking about him. When he absolutely needed to talk about such a painful topic, his only two confidants were Boff and Simon. And he was even reserved with them.
Sometimes he watched Fernand play his fatherly role, to which he brought a great deal of energy, authority, and imagination. Why couldn’t Charles have had such a father? What had he done to deserve one who behaved so odiously towards him? His own father’s image haunted his mind like a wound. Thinking of him was a sort of bottomless pit, an obscure weight that tore at his insides so cruelly that sometimes he had to leave the company of his friends and sit by himself in a corner,
looking dispirited and dejected, scowling at everyone. Or else, bent over his desk at some task, he would suddenly look up with a terrified expression, his twisted mouth gaping open and closed so grotesquely that the other children would snicker and Madame Jacob, for want of anything better to do, would fetch him a smart smack on the back of the head.
He developed an almost servile attachment to Fernand. When the hardware-store owner came home in the evenings, Charles would stop what he was doing and stand in a corner, looking devotedly on as Céline threw herself into his arms and Henri, with his hands in his pockets, told him about some important event in his day. Then Fernand would signal Charles to come over.
“And what about you, my lad,” he would say to Charles, ruffling his hair. “Everything going well?”
Charles would lower his head in bliss, not knowing how to reply.
On Saturday mornings, instead of sleeping in he would get up at eight and go with Henri to work in the store. “For free,” as he was always careful to say; Fernand was touched by the gesture, but didn’t always know how to take advantage of it. He would find little ways to keep the boy busy, teach him a bit of the business, give him small tasks such as tidying up the small storage shed in the yard beside the shop. Charles sometimes got under Clément Labbé’s feet, but as Fernand dryly remarked to him one day, it was the patience one showed to children that ultimately determined whether a man had a good heart.
Fernand tried to use the influence he had over Charles to convince him to improve his conduct at school, especially after his wife, disturbed by the episode of the flooding toilet, began talking about taking the child to see a psychologist.
“If you start showing me better grades,” he said to Charles in Clément Labbé’s presence, “I’ll let you work behind the counter.”
At which the assistant pulled one of his more eloquent faces.
Lucie joined her efforts with those of her husband. One evening, when Charles despite his acute embarrassment allowed her to wash his hair while he was taking his bath, she spoke to him in her tenderest voice. “Charlie, you’ll never guess who I ran into the other day in the grocery store. Your former teacher, Mademoiselle Laramée! My goodness, is she fond of you! She told me what a fine pupil you were, the best in her class, she said, the very best, so eager to learn and so kind to the other pupils …”
Charles the Bold Page 24