He flicked the reins. “Do not think you can rest here all day, you lazy creature,” he told the horse, which flicked its ears to let him know it would think whatever it pleased, and needed no advice from the likes of him.
A green-gray ambulance with red crosses on the sides and roof sped south past Galtier. The military hospital to which it was going was built on land that had been his till the Yankees appropriated it because he’d politely declined to collaborate with them. How fury had burned in him at the injustice! And now…
“And now the eldest of my daughters assists at the hospital,” he said to the horse, “and one of the American doctors, by no means a bad fellow, is most attentive to her. Life can be most peculiar, n’est-ce pas? ” He patted his own leg. Dr. O’Doull had sewn that up, too, when he’d tried to chop it instead of wood. It had healed well, too, better and faster than he’d thought a wound of twenty-one stitches would.
The breeze shifted so that it came out of the north. It brought to Lucien’s ears the rumble of artillery from the other side of the broad river. The Americans, having forced a crossing in better weather the year before, had bogged down in their drive south and west toward Quebec City.
“Tabernac,” Galtier muttered under his breath; Quebecois cursing ran more to holy things than to the obscenity English-speakers used. But he’d learned English-style swearing in his stint as a conscript more than twenty years before, while the Americans here sometimes seemed to go out of their way to curse. Experimentally, he let an English swear word roll off his tongue: “Fuck.” He shook his head. It lacked flavor, like rabbit cooked without applejack.
A handful of fresh, muddy craters just outside of Riviere-du-Loup marked a bombing raid the night before by Canadian and British aeroplanes. He didn’t see that they’d done any particular damage. They did keep trying, though. Pockmarks in the snow cover showed where other, earlier, bombs had fallen. So did a couple of graveled patches in the paving of the roadway.
In town, Galtier drove the wagon to the market square near the church. He quickly sold the potatoes and chickens he’d brought from the farm, and got better prices than he’d expected.
Angelique, the prettiest barmaid at the Loup-du-Nord, who for once did not have an American soldier on one arm, or on both arms, bought a chicken. His eyes traveled her up and down as they dickered. Marie, his wife, would not have approved, but she hadn’t come with him. Because Angelique was so pretty, he might have given her the chicken for a few cents less than someone else would have paid. Marie would not have approved of that, either.
In her breathy little voice, Angelique said, “Have you heard the wonderful news?”
“How can I know until you tell me?” Lucien asked reasonably.
“Father Pascal is to be consecrated Sunday after next!” Angelique exclaimed. “Riviere-du-Loup, after so long, is to be a bishopric, an episcopal see. Is it not marvelous?”
“Yes,” Galtier said, though what he meant was, Yes, it is not marvelous. Father Pascal was plump and pink and nearly as clever as he thought he was. He had welcomed the Yankee invaders with arms as open as Angelique’s. Had he been a woman, he would no doubt have welcomed them with legs as open as Angelique’s.
And here he came now, perhaps drawn by the sight of Angelique (even if a priest, even if a collaborator, he was a man-of sorts) or perhaps by that of poultry. The latter, it proved. He did not haggle so well as his housekeeper; Lucien roundly cheated him. Angelique, bless her, stood by and said never a word.
Feeling mellow with an extra thirty cents in his pocket, Galtier said, “Do I understand you are to be congratulated, Father?”
The priest looked too modest to be quite convincing. “They honor me above my humble deserts.”
“How did it happen that you were raised to this dignity?” Lucien asked.
Before Father Pascal answered, his eyes flicked for a moment to the sidewalk close by the market square. Then, still smooth, still modest, he said, “My son, in truth I have no idea. I felt, when I heard the news, as if a thunderbolt had struck me, I was so astonished.”
But that brief glance had given him away. Along the sidewalk, his green-gray uniform neat as if it had just been issued, strode Major Jedediah Quigley, who administered Riviere-du-Loup and the surrounding area for the U.S. Army. Somehow or other, Lucien was sure, Quigley had pulled the wires behind Father Pascal’s promotion. That might even have involved moving Riviere-du-Loup and the rest of eastern Quebec south of the St. Lawrence out of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishop of Quebec City, who assuredly would never have raised a collaborator to the episcopal dignity.
Major Quigley saw Lucien look toward him. The American officer waved, as if he had not been the man who confiscated the land that had been in Lucien’s family for more than two hundred years to build the military hospital on it. “I hope all goes well with you, Monsieur Galtier,” he called in fluent, Parisian-accented French that seemed almost as out of place in Riviere-du-Loup as English did.
“Assez bien,” Galtier answered grudgingly. Quigley waved again and walked on.
“You will excuse me,” Father Pascal-soon to be Bishop Pascal-said. Off he went, carrying the chicken by its feet. Angelique went off with him. Their heads were close together as they chatted. Watching her walk away was more interesting than eyeing Father Pascal’s backside, even if she too was a collaborator of sorts- a horizontal collaborator, Galtier thought, and smiled at his own wit.
He looked longingly at the Loup-du-Nord. Beer or whiskey or applejack would have helped chase away the cold. But no. The Loup-du-Nord, these days, was an American soldiers’ saloon. He might get his drink and get out without trouble. On the other hand, a tableful of drunken Yanks might decide to stomp him into the floor. “When I get home,” he told the horse, “I can have a drink.”
On his way back to the farmhouse, down the fine paved road the Americans had built, he had to pull off a couple of times to let ambulances race past. Far more than that of the big, stolid trucks, their speed made him wonder what traveling in a motorcar was like. He’d taken train rides, but this seemed as if it would be different-as if he would be riding in a wagon somehow equipped with wings.
When he got to the farm, he drove the emphatically unwinged wagon into the barn. He unharnessed the horse, brushed it down, and fed it before going into the farmhouse. He did not begrudge the delay; it gave him the chance to think of more uncharitable things to say about Father Pascal’s elevation.
And then, when he went inside, he found he could not say most of them. Nicole had brought Dr. Leonard O’Doull home for supper. O’Doull, a skinny, sandy-haired man with eyes as green as a cat’s, was a good fellow, but he was also, to some degree, an outsider.
“Your leg, it goes well?” he asked Galtier after they shook hands. He spoke Parisian French like Major Quigley; unlike the major, he tried to adapt his tongue to that of the folk among whom he found himself.
“It goes very well, thank you.” Lucien walked around to show how well he could move. “I have not even a limp, not unless I am on it for the whole day. When I went into Riviere-du-Loup today, I did not take the stick you gave me, and the leg held me as if it had never been hurt. I am in your debt.”
“Not for that,” O’Doull said. “It is I who am in your debt for your friendship to me when, after all, my country occupies yours.”
“You speak straight,” said Galtier’s elder son, Charles. “That is good.”
“Of course he does,” Nicole said indignantly. Lucien and Marie exchanged an amused look. Nicole defended Dr. O’Doull because of who he was, not because of what he said.