“Think whatever you want,” Anne said wearily. “You care about your family, though. Be careful where you shoot off your mouth. Please.”
“Why? Don’t you have dear old Jake wrapped around your finger?”
Anne’s lips skinned back from her teeth in what was anything but a smile. At that, the question could have been worse; at least he’d asked about her finger and not some other part of her anatomy. She had to hide a small shiver as she answered, “Don’t be stupid, Tom. Anybody who’s ever tried to get Jake Featherston to do what he wants—or what she wants—has ended up either sorry or dead. And before you ask, I think it’s more luck than anything else that I’m still here.”
More than her words, she thought, her tone got through to Tom. His eyes, blue as her own, went wide. He blurted, “Sweet Jesus Christ, Anne, you’re scared to death of him!”
“Anybody who’s met him and who isn’t is a fool,” she said. “Standing up against him is like standing up to a hurricane. You can yell and scream and fight and carry on, but he’ll blow you over just the same.”
He laughed. She’d known he would, and she’d known why. Sure enough, he said, “That’s how people talk about you, you know.”
“Oh, yes.” She waved the words aside for now; she’d assess the hurt later. For the time being, she wanted to make sure she was understood: “But he’s . . . he’s serious about things. He’s serious all the time. And what he wants, happens. I don’t always know how it does, but it does. Think about it. The Whigs had run things here for as long as the Confederate States were a country. If they couldn’t stop Jake Featherston—and they damned well couldn’t—what can? Nothing. Nobody.”
Tom Colleton shook his head in disbelief. “You talk about him like he really is a hurricane. He’s just a man, Sis.”
Anne shook her head, too. “Oh, he’s a man, all right. He sleeps. He eats. He goes to the toilet.” That jerked a startled laugh out of her brother. She went on, “He’ll die one of these days. If that nigger had shot him at the Olympics, he’d’ve died right then. But as long as he’s alive, he’s not just a man. For a long time, I thought he was, too. So did a lot of people. Look what’s happened since. We were wrong, every single one of us.”
Another cigarette out of the pack. The scrape and flare of another match. The harsh stink of sulfur before the mellower smell of tobacco smoke. Tom blew a smoke ring up toward the ceiling, maybe to give himself time to think. He said, “I never reckoned anybody could make you talk like that.”
“Did you think I did?” she flared. “But Jake does make me talk that way. And you’d better be careful how you talk, too. If you do anything stupid, I can’t protect you. Have you got that? I can’t. Featherston and the stalwarts will do whatever they want. Oh, he might listen to me if I beg hard enough. He might. I’ve done some useful things for him, and he might throw me a bone. But I walked away from the Freedom Party once, remember? I thought he was finished, and I went back to the Whigs. He never forgets something like that. He might use you to pay me back, too. Don’t give him the chance. Please.”
Had she ever said please to him before? Oh, she’d said it. She must have. Everybody did, for politeness’ sake. But had she ever meant it the way she had twice in the past five minutes? She didn’t think so. Children meant please, especially when they got into trouble. Usually, grownups didn’t have to.
Her desperate urgency must have got through to her brother. He put out the latest cigarette—by now, the ashtray was full of butts—and got to his feet. “All right,” he said. “I’ll keep quiet. But it’s not for your sake. It’s for Bertha and the kids.”
“I don’t care why. Just do it,” Anne said. He left the flat without another word. She thought he’d slam the door, but he didn’t. The restraint was worse. It felt like a slap in the face. She wondered if they would ever have anything to say to each other again.
Lucien Galtier looked up at the sky. The sun was sliding down toward the northwest, but it wouldn’t set for a long time yet. When summer days came to the country by Rivière-du-Loup, they lasted. Long days meant short nights. He’d always thought that was good. It let him get more work done and spend more time with his family. Now . . . Now, suddenly, he wondered.
Oh, the work went on. He couldn’t imagine the work stopping altogether. If the work stopped, wasn’t that a sure sign he was dead? He could still do the work, too. He took a certain somber pride in that. True, he wasn’t young any more. But he was still strong. Thinking about that made him laugh.
He was walking back from weeding the potato plot, hoe on his shoulder like a soldier’s rifle, when an auto came up the track from the road toward his farmhouse. He picked up the pace, like a soldier going from ordinary march to double time. That machine belonged to the O’Doulls.
Sure enough, his son-in-law got out of the motorcar and stood there waiting for him. “A good day to you!” Galtier called to Dr. Leonard O’Doull. “And what brings you here?”
“What brings me here?” O’Doull patted the iron flank of the motorcar. “My automobile, what else?”
“Thank you so much.” Lucien unshouldered the hoe and made as if to swing it, like a soldier starting bayonet drill. “Let me ask the question another way, then: why have you come here?”
“Oh! Why?” What he meant might not have occurred to Dr. O’Doull before. Galtier didn’t believe that for a moment, but his son-in-law played the role of a suddenly enlightened one well. “I had some business at the hospital”—he pointed to the big building the U.S. Army had run up on Galtier’s land during the war—“and I thought I would stop by as long as I was so close.”
“Good. I’m glad you did. Come inside, if you like,. We can have a little something to drink, smoke a cigar—with an afternoon’s weeding behind me, I could use a cigar, and I could truly use a drink.”
His son-in-law laughed. “Motion carried by acclamation, without a dissenting voice.”
Lucien stowed the hoe in the barn. He and Leonard O’Doull went into the house through the door that led to the kitchen. Galtier knew the place wasn’t so clean and neat as it had been when Marie was alive. All he could do was hope she wouldn’t have been too displeased with the way he kept it up. He busied himself pouring a couple of glasses of applejack, and handed one to the American who’d married Nicole.
“Merci beaucoup.” Dr. O’Doull reached into a jacket pocket and took out two cigars. He gave one to Galtier. “Here you are. I delivered a baby boy yesterday. These are part of the reward from the father.”
“I thank you. I thank him. Come—let’s go into the front room.” When they’d sat down, when they had the cigars going, Lucien raised his glass of homemade Calvados. “Salut!” he said, and drank.
So did O’Doull. After a good swig, he whistled softly. “Son of a bitch,” he said in English, a tongue he used these days only when taken by surprise. He sipped again, more cautiously, and returned to French: “Potent stuff.”
“Yes, a strong batch,” Lucien agreed. Quality varied wildly from one jug to the next, as was only to be expected when people made the stuff in small stills with no tedious government regulations or even more tedious taxes. “Strong, but good. So . . . How wags your world?”
“Well enough, if I didn’t set fire to my liver there,” Leonard O’Doull replied. “For myself, for Nicole and little Lucien, all is well, as I hope it is for you.”
“As you say, well enough.” Galtier puffed on the cigar. He’d had better. Whoever the new father was, he was a cheapskate. He paused. “All is well for your family, you say, which is good. All is not so well somewhere else?” He wasn’t sure he’d heard that in the doctor’s voice, but thought he had.
And O’Doull nodded. “I am not nearly so sure I like the direction in which I see the world headed.”
Galtier tried to make sense of that. “What man ever does?”
“Non, mon beau-père, not like that,” O’Doull said. “Not the little thoughts that make a man wonder if he is all he should be.
When I say the world, I mean . . . the world.” His expansive gesture not only took in the whole world, it nearly knocked over a lamp on the table next to the sofa where he sat. Maybe the applejack was hitting hard and fast. Maybe, too, he did have something big on his mind.
“And what of the world?” Lucien Galtier asked. “Most of it goes its way far from here. When I remember how things were when that was not so, I think this is not so bad. I can do without soldiers and bombs and such things on my doorstep. That ambulance driver I saw, poor fellow, wounded in his very manhood . . .” He shuddered and sipped again from his own drink.
“If you will recall, though, helping the wounded is why I first came to Quebec.” O’Doull picked up his glass. Instead of drinking, he stared at the pale yellow apple brandy. “I have been comfortable here for many years, forgetting the world and by the world forgot. But I fear one day I may have to go back to my proper craft, healing the wounded once more.”
“Here? In Quebec?” Lucien shook his head. “I do not believe it.”
“Nor I,” O’Doull replied with a sweet, sad smile. “But the world, poor thing, is wider than Quebec, and wilder, too, worse luck. And I am a doctor, and I am an American, and if my country should ever need me in another war—”
“God forbid!” Galtier broke in, and crossed himself.
“Yes. God forbid.” Leonard O’Doull nodded. “So the world said in 1914. But God did not forbid. And so, if He should happen to be watching a football match again . . .” Lucien laughed at the delicious blasphemy. His son-in-law was not in a laughing mood. O’Doull went on, “If that happens, how could I stay quiet here, attending to cases of measles and rheumatism? That would be a waste of everything for which I trained.”
The worst part of it was, what he said made sense to Galtier. Soberly—in spite of the applejack—the farmer said, “All I can tell you is, may this not come to pass.”
“Yes. May it not, indeed.” O’Doull knocked back the rest of his drink. After he got over the coughing fit that followed—the stuff was too strong for such cavalier treatment—he said, “Thank you for letting me share my darkness with you.”
“C’est rien,” Lucien replied. “And it is nothing because who but you saw my darkness not so long ago?” Who but you caused it? he thought. But that wasn’t fair, and he knew as much. O’Doull had only diagnosed the trouble Marie already had.
“Between the Action Française and the Freedom Party and the Silver Shirts in England, the world is a nastier place than it was ten years ago,” O’Doull said. “And in Russia, the Tsar seems to think the Jews cause all his problems, and no one seems to want to stay in Austria-Hungary except the Austrians and the Hungarians, and even the Hungarians are not so sure. And the Turks treat the Armenians as the Russians treat the Jews, and—”
“And you Americans hold down English-speaking Canada.” Galtier hadn’t expected to say that. It just popped out. He wondered if his son-in-law would be offended.
But Leonard O’Doull only nodded. “Yes. And that. Small next to some of the others, I believe, but no less real even so.” He got to his feet. “And now I had better leave. If you ask me to have another drink, I’ll say yes, and then I’ll be too drunk to go back to Rivière-du-Loup, and Nicole will be unhappy with me—and with you.” He gave a curiously old-fashioned bow, then made his way to the door, and to his motorcar.
Galtier wasn’t going anywhere that night. He made himself another drink, and poured it all down. Maybe it helped him go to sleep. After O’Doull’s dark fantasies, he needed all the help he could get.
When Sunday came, he drove into Rivière-du-Loup to hear Mass. As he’d got into the habit of doing the past few months, he stopped at Éloise Granche’s house to give her a ride into town. “Bonjour, Lucien,” she said as he opened the passenger-side door of the Chevrolet for her. “You look very handsome today.”
“I thank you . . . for not buying new spectacles any time lately,” he replied. She laughed. He went on, “Now, I do not need spectacles of any sort to know what a pretty woman I am lucky enough to have with me.”
“How you do go on,” she said, but indulgently.
When they got to the church, Éloise saw some lady friends and went to chat with them. Lucien sat in the bosom of his family. Nothing could have been more decorous. Nicole said, “How nice that you were able to bring Mme. Granche again.” Lucien nodded. The service started a moment later.
After taking communion, Galtier led Éloise Granche back to his auto. As they’d driven north, so they went south. When he stopped by the house, she said, “Would you care to come in for a cup of tea?”
“Thank you. I’d like that. I can’t stay long, though,” he replied.
They went inside. Everything was quiet and peaceful—and dark, for Éloise had no electricity. She turned. Lucien took her in his arms. A moment later, they were holding each other and kissing and murmuring endearments, for all the world as if they were a couple of youngsters discovering love for the very first time.
Laughing, exulting in his strength, Lucien lifted her into his arms and carried her upstairs to the bedroom. “Be careful!” Éloise exclaimed. “You’ll hurt yourself.” He laughed some more. She said that every time. He hadn’t hurt himself yet, and didn’t seem likely to. And the soft feel of her made the way his heart pounded till he gently set her on the bed seem altogether worthwhile.
Before too long, his heart was pounding again, from an even more pleasurable exertion. “Oh, Lucien!” Éloise gasped, urging him on. Her nails dug into his back. “So sweet,” she murmured, eyes half closed. “So sweet.”
Afterwards, he gave her a kiss as he lay beside her. His heart was still drumming, harder than it would have when he was a younger man. He had more trouble catching his breath, too, than he would have when he and Marie were newlyweds.
“One of these days,” he said, “we should have Father Guillaume say the words over us.”
Women were supposed to be the ones who wanted such things, but Éloise shook her head, as she had several times before. “Not necessary,” she said. “Better if he doesn’t, in fact. It would only complicate matters with both our families. If we marry, it turns into a question of patrimonies. If we don’t, then this is . . . what it is, that’s all. I like it better this way.”
Lucien set a hand on his chest and mimed complete exhaustion. “I don’t think I could like it better than this,” he said. Éloise laughed again. They laughed a lot when they were alone together. Neither one of them had done much laughing for a long time before. And that, to Lucien, mattered almost as much as the other.
Cincinnatus Driver wasn’t an old man. No one—except his son, of course—could have accused him of being an old man. He was strong. His hair was—mostly—dark. He remained three years on the good side of fifty. None of that, though, had kept him from turning into a grandfather.
Karen Driver wiggled in his arms. He was getting used to holding a baby all over again. Karen weighed no more than a big cat, which is to say, nothing to speak of. He was getting used to the way she looked, too. Her skin was lighter than his, but not quite the coffee-with-cream color of Negroes with a fair amount of white blood. She had her mother’s narrow eyes with the folds of skin at the inner corners, too.
“She’s going to be beautiful,” Cincinnatus said. “She’s already beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Grace Driver said softly. Cincinnatus and Elizabeth had accepted her more readily than her folks accepted Achilles. The child helped and hurt at the same time. The Changs did love the baby, but Grace’s mother blamed her for not having a boy . . . among other things.
Karen stopped wiggling, screwed up her little face, and grunted. Cincinnatus laughed. He had no trouble remembering what that meant. He handed her to her mother. “She done made a mess in her drawers,” he said. He was just Karen’s granddad. He didn’t have to clean her up himself.
“I’ll take care of her,” Grace said, and changed the baby’s diaper.
Cincinnatus tur
ned to his son. “How you doin’?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” Achilles answered, more of Iowa than of Kentucky in his accent. Cincinnatus knew his son would have said the same thing if he were living on the street and eating what he could fish out of garbage cans. Achilles had his own full measure of the family’s stubbornness. But he wasn’t on the street; he continued, “That clerking job of mine isn’t what you’d call exciting, but I can pay my bills. I won’t get rich, but I’m doing fine.”
“Good. That’s good.” Cincinnatus had been on his own when he was younger than Achilles was now, but he hadn’t had to worry about a family then. And a young black in Confederate Kentucky hadn’t had the hopes and dreams of one in U.S. Iowa. Cincinnatus had been brutally sure he wouldn’t, couldn’t, get very far ahead of the game. Achilles could aspire to more. He might not get it, but if he didn’t he’d have to blame himself as well as the system under which he lived. Down in the CSA, the system gave any Negro an easy excuse for failure.
“Let me have my grandbaby,” Elizabeth said, and reached for Karen. Elizabeth took to being a grandmother with none of the doubts about age and the like that troubled Cincinnatus. And Karen fascinated Amanda, who at fourteen was plenty old enough to help take care of her niece.
“How you doin’ with your folks these days?” Cincinnatus asked Grace.
Before she could answer, Achilles said, “Well, her daddy hasn’t called me a nigger, but he sure has come close.”
“I didn’t ask how you was doin’ with Mr. Chang,” Cincinnatus said sharply. “I asked how Grace was.”
“It is still hard,” she answered. “It is still very hard, like Achilles said. My father and especially my mother are not modern people. They think of China all the time. They don’t think we are all Americans. They don’t think we are all the same.”
Achilles stirred at that. “Pa doesn’t think we’re all the same, either. He thinks colored people are down at the bottom of the pile.”
The Victorious Opposition Page 29