The Victorious Opposition (11 page)

“Let me have a look here. . . .” Navin consulted the all-important clipboard. “Six.”

“Where they at?” Cincinnatus asked. The conductor read off the addresses. Cincinnatus spread his hands, pale palms up. “You runnin’ me all over creation. I got to ask four dollars. Oughta say five—I might not make it back here to git me another load today.”

“Pay you three and a quarter,” Navin said.

“My mama didn’t raise no fools,” Cincinnatus said. “I get my ass over to the riverside. I get honest pay for honest work there.”

“You’re the blackest damn Jew I ever seen,” Navin said. Cincinnatus only grinned; that wasn’t the first time people had said such things about him. Still grumbling, the conductor said, “Well, hell, three-fifty. Since it’s you.”

“Don’t do me no favors like that,” Cincinnatus told him. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere till I don’t lose money on the way, and you ain’t got there yet.”

They settled at $3.75. A few years earlier, that wouldn’t have been enough to keep Cincinnatus in the black. But he was more efficient now than he had been—and prices on everything had come down since money got so tight.

He loaded what seemed like nine million flowerpots into the back of the Ford, using ratty old blankets to keep one stack from bumping another. Anything he broke, of course, he was stuck with. He winced every time the truck jounced over a pothole. He’d done a little thinking before leaving the railroad yard with the flowerpots. The couple of minutes he spent probably saved him an hour of travel time, for he worked out the best route to take to get to all six nurseries and department stores. That was part of what being efficient was all about.

It let him get back to the railroad yard just past two in the afternoon: plenty of time to get more cargo and deliver it before sundown. With the sun setting as he finished the second load, he drove home, parking the truck in front of his apartment building. When he walked into the apartment, his daughter Amanda was doing homework at the kitchen table, while Elizabeth, his wife, fried ham steaks in a big iron spider on the stove.

Cincinnatus gave Elizabeth a quick kiss, then said, “Where’s Achilles at? He in his room?”

She shook her head. She was cooking in the maid’s clothes she’d worn to work. “He blew in a little before you got home, stayed just long enough to change his clothes, and then he done blew out again,” she said.

“Why’d he bother changin’?” Cincinnatus asked. “What he does, he don’t need to.” Thanks not least to Cincinnatus’ insistence—sometimes delivered with a two-by-four—his son had earned his high-school diploma. Then he’d amazed everyone—including, very likely, himself—by landing a clerk’s job at an insurance company. He wasn’t likely to work up much of a sweat filing papers or adding up columns of numbers.

But Elizabeth said, “Why you think? He takin’ Grace out to the movin’ pictures again.”

“Oh.” Cincinnatus didn’t know how to go on from there. Grace Chang lived in the apartment right upstairs from his own. Her father ran a laundry and brewed excellent beer (a very handy talent in a state as thoroughly dry as Iowa). Cincinnatus couldn’t deny that Grace was a sweet girl, or that she was a pretty girl. No one at all could deny that she was a Chinese girl.

She’d been going out with Achilles for more than a year now. It made Cincinnatus acutely nervous. These weren’t the Confederate States, and Grace wasn’t white, but even so. . . . Having the two of them go out together also made Mr. Chang nervous. He liked Achilles well enough—he’d known him since he was a little boy—but there was no denying Achilles wasn’t Chinese.

“Ain’t nothin’ good gonna come o’ this,” Cincinnatus said heavily.

Elizabeth didn’t answer right away. She flipped the ham steaks over with a long-handled spatula. “Never can tell,” she said when they were sizzling again. “No, never can tell. Mebbe grandkids come o’ this.”

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. “You reckon he wants to marry her?”

His wife used the spatula on a mess of potatoes frying in a smaller pan. Then she said, “Don’t reckon he go with a gal for more’n a year unless he thinkin’ ‘bout that. Don’t reckon she go with him unless she thinkin’ ‘bout it, too.”

“What do we do, he ends up marryin’ the Chinaman’s daughter?” Cincinnatus asked.

Elizabeth turned more potatoes before answering, “Upstairs right about now, I reckon Mr. Chang sayin’ to his missus, ‘What we do, they git married?’ ” Her effort to reproduce a singsong Chinese accent was one of the funnier things Cincinnatus had heard lately.

But that bad accent wasn’t the only reason he started laughing. Even though Achilles and Grace had been going out for more than a year, nobody outside their families had said a word to either one of them about their choice of partner. It was as if white Des Moines—the vast majority of the town—couldn’t get excited about what either a Negro or a Chinese did, so long as it didn’t involve any whites.

Supper was fine. Cincinnatus wanted to stay up and wait for Achilles, but the day he’d put in caught up with him. He went to bed, where he dreamt he was trying to sneak into the USA in his truck so he could take Grace Chang to the moving pictures, but people kept throwing flowerpots at him, so he couldn’t get in.

A snore came from behind Achilles’ door when Cincinnatus got up. His son didn’t have to be at the office till nine o’clock, so he got to sleep late. That meant Cincinnatus had to head out before Achilles got up. It also meant Cincinnatus couldn’t talk to him about Grace. He had told Achilles an education would come in handy all sorts of ways. Now, to his chagrin, he discovered just how right he was.

L
ucien Galtier got into his motorcar for the drive up to Rivière-du-Loup. The Chevrolet started when Galtier turned the key. One thing any Quebecois with an auto soon learned was the importance of keeping the battery strongly charged in winter—and, up there by the St. Lawrence, winter lasted a long time.

“Here we go,” Galtier said. He was a small, trim man who’d just turned sixty. He looked it—a life outdoors had left his skin wrinkled and leathery—but he was still vigorous, his hair no lighter than iron gray. When he drove a wagon up into town, he’d had endless philosophical discussions with the horse. The motorcar made a less satisfying partner for such things than the horse had, but enjoyed certain advantages the beast lacked. No horse yet had ever come with a heater.

The highway was a black asphalt line scribed on the whiteness of fresh snow. By now, with so many years of weathering behind them, the shell holes from the Great War were hard to spy with snow on the ground. Oh, here and there a pockmark gave a clue, but little by little the earth was healing itself.

Healing, however, was not the same as healed. Every so often, the cycle of freeze and thaw brought to the surface long-buried shells, often rotten with corrosion. Demolition experts in the blue-gray uniforms of the Republic of Quebec disposed of most of those. The spring before, though, Henri Beauchamp had found one with his plow while tilling the ground. His son Jean-Marie now had that farm, a couple of miles from Galtier’s, and there hadn’t been enough left of poor luckless Henri to bury. Lucien didn’t know what to do about that danger. If he didn’t plow, he wouldn’t eat.

Rivière-du-Loup sat on the bluffs from which the river that gave it its name plunged down into the St. Lawrence. It was a market town, a river port, and a railroad stop. It was the biggest town Galtier had ever seen, except for a few brief visits to Toronto while he was in the Canadian Army more than forty years before. How it measured up in the larger scheme of things he really didn’t know. He really didn’t care, either. At his age, he wasn’t going anywhere else.

On this crisp, chilly Sunday morning, Rivière-du-Loup seemed even larger than it was. Plenty of farm families from the countryside had come in to hear Mass at the Église Saint-Patrice on Rue Lafontaine. As he usually did, Galtier parked on a side street and walked to the church. More and more motorcars clogged Rivière-du-Loup’s narrow streets, which had been built before anyone thought of motorcars. On Sunday mornings, a lot of horse-drawn wagons kept them company. Seeing a wagon much like the one he’d driven threw Lucien into a fit of nostalgia.

He came to the church at the same time as his oldest daughter, Nicole; her husband, Dr. Leonard O’Doull; and their son, Lucien, whose size astonished his grandfather every time he saw his namesake. “What is it that you feed this one?” he demanded of the boy’s parents.

Leonard O’Doull looked puzzled. “You mean we’re supposed to
feed
him?” he said. “I knew we’d been forgetting something.” He spoke very good Quebecois French; his American accent and his Parisian accent had both faded in the seventeen years since he’d been married to Nicole.

“How are you,
mon père?
” Nicole asked.

“Pas pire,”
he answered, which, like the English
not bad
, would do for everything between agony and ecstasy. He’d known his share of agony a few years before, when his wife died. Ecstasy? Getting new grandchildren came as close as anything he was likely to find at his age.

Pointing, Nicole said, “There’s Charles,” at the same time as her husband said, “There’s Georges.” Galtier waved to his older and younger sons and their families in turn. His second daughter, Denise, and her husband and children came up as he was greeting his sons. Maybe his other two girls were already in church, or maybe they hadn’t come into town this Sunday.

“Come on.” Georges, who would always take the bull by the horns, led the way in. “The world had better look out, because here come the Galtiers.” He towered over both Lucien and Charles, who took after his father. With Georges in the lead, maybe the world
did
need to look out for the Galtiers.

They weren’t the only large clan going into the church. Quebecois ran to lots of children and to close family ties, so plenty of brothers and sisters and cousins paraded in as units for their friends and neighbors to admire. Filling a couple of rows of pews was by no means an unusual accomplishment.

Bishop Guillaume presided over Mass. No breath of scandal attached itself to him, as it had to his predecessor in the see, Bishop Pascal. Pascal had been—no doubt still was—pink and plump and clever. He’d been too quick by half to attach himself to the Americans during the war. Galtier still thought he’d used their influence to get Rivière-du-Loup named an episcopal see—and that he’d done it more for himself than for the town. He’d left the bishopric—and Rivière-du-Loup—in something of a blaze of glory, when his lady friend presented him with twins.

Galtier found it highly unlikely that Bishop Guillaume would ever father twins. He was well up into his sixties, and ugly as a mud fence. He had a wart on his chin and another on his nose; his eyes, pouched below, were those of a mournful hound; his ears made people think of an auto going down the street with its doors open. He was a
good
man. Lucien didn’t doubt that a bit. Who would give him the chance to be bad?

He was also a pious man. Lucien didn’t doubt that, either, where he’d always wondered about Bishop Pascal—and, evidently, had excellent good reason to wonder. Guillaume preached sermons that were thoughtful, Scriptural, well organized . . . and just a little dull.

After this one, and after receiving Holy Communion, Lucien said, “Sermons are the one thing I miss about Pascal. You’d always get something worth hearing from him. It might not have anything to do with the church, but it was always interesting.”

“Pascal’s favorite subject was always Pascal,” Georges said.

Leonard O’Doull raised an eyebrow. His long, fair face marked him as someone out of the ordinary in this crowd of dark, Gallic Quebecois. “And how is he so different from you, then?” he asked mildly.

Georges’ brother and sisters laughed. Lucien chuckled. As for Georges . . . well, nothing fazed Georges. “How is he different from me?” he echoed. “Don’t be silly, my dear brother-in-law.
My
favorite subject was never Pascal.”

His family, or those among them old enough to understand the joke, groaned in unison. “Someone must have dropped you on your head when you were a baby,” Lucien said. “Otherwise, how could you have turned out the way you are?”

“What’s this you say?” Georges asked in mock astonishment. “Don’t you think I take after you?”

That was absurd enough to draw another round of groans from his kin. Charles, who really did resemble Lucien in temperament as well as looks, said, “You should count yourself lucky Papa didn’t take after you—with a hatchet.”

Incorrigible Georges did an impersonation of a chicken after it met the hatchet and before it decided it was dead and lay still. He staggered all over the sidewalk, scattering relatives—and a few neighbors—in his wake. He managed to run into Charles twice, which surprised Lucien very little. When they were younger, Charles had dominated his brother till Georges grew too big for him to get away with it any more. Georges had been getting even ever since.

“Come back to my house, everyone,” Dr. O’Doull urged, as he did on most Sundays. “We can eat and drink and talk, and the children can take turns getting in trouble.”

“So can the grownups,” Nicole said, with a sidelong look at Georges.

O’Doull was doing well for himself; he was probably the most popular doctor in Rivière-du-Loup. He had a good-sized house. But it could have been as big as the Fraser Manor—the biggest house in town by a long shot—and still seemed crowded when Galtiers filled it.

Lucien found himself with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He stared at it in mild wonder. He was much more used to drinking beer or locally made applejack that didn’t bother with tedious government formalities about taxes. He sipped. He’d had applejack that was stronger; he’d had applejack where, if you breathed towards an open flame after a swig, your lungs would catch fire. He sipped again. “What gives it that flavor?”

“It comes from the charred barrels they use to age the whiskey,” his son-in-law answered.

“So we are drinking . . . burnt wood?” Galtier said.

“So we are,” Leonard O’Doull agreed. He sipped his own whiskey, with appreciation. “Tasty,
n’est-ce pas
?”