American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (80 page)

  “Easy, easy, easy.” Featherston had known it would be bad. He hadn’t known it would be this bad. He hurried on: “Vice president isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit anyhow. Let Willy-boy have it. He’ll think it’s great—till he figures out he hasn’t really got anything. Give him the slot, if he wants it so bad. But I’ll give you something that’s really worth having.”

  “What is it?” Koenig’s voice remained hard with suspicion.

  “Well, now, I’ll tell you.” Featherston proceeded to do just that. He hadn’t had such a tough audience since the early meeting that had left him master of the Party. And Ferd had been on his side then. Now he had to talk an old friend, an old comrade, around. At last, he asked, “Is it all right?” Koenig stuck out his hand. “Yeah, Jake. It
is
all right. Don’t worry about it.” Featherston’s clasp was full of relief.

 
“H
ere, Papa. Let me show you how it’s done.” Georges Galtier dug his pitchfork into a bale of hay and flung food to the livestock in the barn. When he got to the horse’s stall, he said, “I don’t know why you don’t turn this miserable animal into glue and food for pampered poodles in Montreal.”

 
  “Tabernac!”
 Lucien Galtier said, and shook his head at his younger son. “I could never do that.”

  “What does he do but eat?” Georges persisted. “He doesn’t take you into Rivière-du-Loup any more.

  He doesn’t pull a plow. What good is he?”

  “He listened to me. For years, he listened to me,” Lucien answered. “Whenever I would hitch up the wagon, I would talk to him. He knows every thought I had.”

  “All the more reason to get rid of him,” Georges said, absurd as usual. “Dead horses tell no tales.” But even as he mocked the old beast, he gave it more hay than Lucien was in the habit of doing.

  “With help like yours . . .” Lucien shook his head. “The trouble with you is, you think I can do nothing for myself any more.”

  “The trouble with
you
is, you think you can still do everything for yourself,” Georges said.

  “By the good God, I can!” Lucien said hotly. “I’m not sixty yet, and even sixty doesn’t mean one foot in the grave.” He grimaced, wishing he hadn’t put it like that. Poor Marie had never seen sixty.

  His son said, “Papa, you are a formidable man.” Georges’ praise alarmed him more than anything else he could think of. The younger Galtier continued, “Even so, will you tell me you are as formidable as you were when you were my age? Will you say that?”

  “Well . . . no.” Lucien wanted to say yes, but it would have been a lie. He knew it as well as Georges did—better. His joints were stiff, he got tired more easily than he had, his wind wasn’t what it had been. . .

  “Even for a young man, farm work isn’t easy,” Georges said. “I ought to know. There are times when I wish I were still in my twenties.”

  Twenties! Lucien laughed at that. For him, the twenties seemed as long gone as Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. He wished he were in his forties. That would no doubt have horrified Georges, who had yet to see them. Lucien said, “Thanks to you and your brother and my sons-in-law, I do not have to do everything by myself. I am not ready to walk away from the farm. Did you think I would?”

  “No, not really,” Georges replied. “But one day, you know, it could be that you might need to. If you think about it now, you will be readier when the time comes.”

 
  “Mauvais tabernac!”
 Lucien said, which summed up what he thought about that.
“ ‘Osti!”
 he added for good measure. “I will worry about such things when the time comes, and not until then. Meanwhile, let’s get this work done here—or would you rather stand around and gab? You always were a lazy one.”

  “Nonsense,” Georges said with dignity. “I am merely . . . efficient.”

  “You are the most efficient I have ever seen at getting out of work,” Lucien said. But, between them, they quickly finished off the rest of what needed doing.

  Cold smote when they left the barn. As always, the land around Rivière-du-Loup laughed at the calendar, which insisted spring was only a couple of weeks away. Snow blanketed the ground. More danced in the air. Lucien took it altogether for granted—and then, all at once, he didn’t. How would one explain something so curious to someone from, say, the Confederate state of Cuba, or the U.S. state of California, or someplace else where it didn’t snow? It wasn’t like rain, which simply fell, splat. It fluttered on the breeze, it swirled, it twisted. Would a stranger who didn’t know about it take your word when you described it?

  “I wouldn’t believe it myself,” Lucien muttered, stamping up the stairs toward the kitchen door.

  Georges, on his heels, asked, “Wouldn’t believe what?”

  “I wouldn’t believe what a nosy son I have.” Lucien opened the door. “But come in anyhow, and I’ll see what I can find for you to eat. I know you’ll waste away if I don’t.” Charles, his older son, was small and lean like him and Marie. Georges, somehow, had grown up a great strapping man, most of a head taller than Lucien and broad through the shoulders. His appetite—all his appetites—seemed in proportion.

  He sighed as he followed Lucien out of the snow. “Every time I come in here, I keep thinking—I keep hoping—I’ll see
chère Maman
at the stove, baking something good.”

  “I know.” Lucien sighed, too. “I feel the same. But it will not happen, not this side of heaven—which means a couple of sinners like us had better mend our ways.”

  “This is a better reason to be good than most others I can think of,” Georges said. “And what do we have?”

  “Cold chicken in the icebox,” Lucien answered. “Bread on the counter there—all the ladies for miles around give me bread, for they know I am no baker—and a good jug of applejack in the pantry. Even for a walking steam shovel like you, it should be enough,
n’est-ce pas?
 ”

  “Steam shovel? I believe I’ve been insulted,” Georges said. “Do you know, Papa, I permit only two people in all the world to insult me—you and Sophie.”

  “You do not need to permit your wife to insult you,” Lucien said, pouring two glasses of applejack. “It will happen whether you permit it or not—of this you may be sure.” He handed one glass to his younger son, then raised the other. “Your good health.”

  “And yours.” Georges knocked back the drink. “Whew!” He whistled respectfully. “A good thing I didn’t have a cigarette in my mouth, or I think my lungs would have caught fire. That’s strong stuff.” Lucien sipped. The applejack, like most of what he drank, didn’t conform to the Republic of Quebec’s tedious rules about licenses and taxes. A nearby farmer cooked it up from the harvest of his orchard. As a result, quality varied widely from one batch to the next. As Georges had said, this jug was on the potent side.

  “Here,” Lucien said. “Slice the bread and get some butter for it. I’ll cut up the chicken. If you want it hot, I can build up the fire in the stove.”

  “Don’t bother,” Georges told him. “If the stove were electric like everything else here, so it was easy . . . But now, cold is fine.”

  “All right. Cold it will be, then.” As Lucien got out the chicken and a knife, he felt Marie’s ghost hovering there. He could almost hear her telling him he was making a clumsy botch of things, that he didn’t keep the kitchen clean enough to suit her. No matter what he did, he knew he couldn’t hope to match her standards. He tried as hard as he could, though. He wanted her to know he was making the effort.

  Georges sighed as he dug in. “I ate a lot of suppers in this house,” he said. “No matter where I live, this will always be what I think of as home.”

  “It is your patrimony,” Lucien said simply.

  “It is where I grew up,” Georges said, which wasn’t quite the same thing but wasn’t far removed from it, either. He sighed again. “It was another time.”

  “When you were a boy, it was another country,” Lucien said.

  “I don’t think about Canada much any more,” Georges said. “Considering what’s happened to the rest of it, we’re lucky to be where we are.”

  “Yes. Considering.” Lucien Galtier could hardly disagree with that. He poured himself some more apple brandy. “You were young when the change happened—not so hard for you to get used to it. I was a grown man. There were times when I felt torn in two, especially when the Americans treated us so badly in the first part of their occupation. I did all the small things a man can do to resist—all the small things, but none of the large. I had not the courage for that, not with six children, and four of them girls.”

  “And now you have an American son-in-law, and a half-American grandson,” Georges said. “And what do you think of that?”

  “Leonard O’Doull is a fine man. Even you will not deny he is a fine man,” Lucien said, and Georges didn’t. Lucien went on, “And the boy who bears my name . . . He is as fine a boy as a grandfather could want. I wish he had brothers and sisters, but that is in the hands of
le bon Dieu
.” He suspected it was in Dr. O’Doull’s hands at least as much as in God’s. Contraception was of course illegal in staunchly Catholic, staunchly conservative Quebec. If anyone could get around such laws, though, a doctor could. And his son-in-law, while a good Catholic, was also a man who thought his own thoughts. A priest probably would not hear everything he might have to confess.

  “Well, Charles has three, Susanne has three, Denise has four, my Sophie’s expecting her third, and even Jeanne is going to have her second in a few weeks,” Georges said. “Lucien may lack for brothers and sisters, but he doesn’t lack for cousins.”

  “This is good. This is all good,” Galtier said. Repeating himself—was the applejack hitting so hard? Was he getting old, so he couldn’t hold his liquor? Or was he getting old, so he talked too much whether he was drunk or not? He was getting old. However much he’d been at pains to deny it to Georges, he knew better than to deny it to himself.

  Georges said, “Sure enough, we Galtiers will end up taking over Quebec before we’re through.”

  “And why not?” Lucien said. “After all, someone has to. And if we don’t, it’s liable to be people like Bishop Pascal’s—excuse me, Pascal Talon’s—twins.”

  His son laughed. “Not all children can have such a distinguished father.”

  “He was always out for whatever he could get. Always,” Lucien said. “He served God so he could help himself. He served the Americans so he could help himself. And if the Americans had lost, if the English-speaking Canadians and the British had won instead, he would have wormed his way back into their good graces, too.”

  “He certainly wormed his way into his lady friend’s good graces,” Georges said. “Twins!”

  “That’s what I said at the time,” Lucien agreed. “A priest—even a bishop—is also a man. This is true, beyond a doubt. But twins are excessive.”

  “Excessive. There’s a good word.” Georges nodded. This time, he was the one who filled the glasses with apple brandy. “Tell me, Papa—do you not think it is also excessive to begin sending our young men from Quebec to help the Americans hold down the parts of Canada they occupy?”

  “They have asked us to do this for a long time,” Galtier said slowly. “Up till now, we have always managed to get around it.”

  “Now they say that, because they are fighting this war with Japan, they need our help more than ever,” Georges said. “I don’t see how we can get around it any more. So what do you think?”

  “What I always thought. When the Americans recognized the Republic of Quebec, they didn’t do it for us Quebecois. They did it for themselves. They are the big brother, the rich brother; we are the little brother, the poor relation, and we have to do what they say. That is how they see it, anyhow.”

  “How do
you
see it?”

  Before answering, Lucien drained the glass Georges had poured for him. “How do I see? Blurrily . . . But that is not what you asked. The United States
are
very large. They
are
very rich. They
are
the ones who made us a country they say is free. But if we truly
are
free, we can tell them no if we like.”

  “And suppose they don’t like it after that?”

  “Will they go to war with us because they don’t like it? I have my doubts. Whether our politicians in Quebec City have the wit to see this . . .
Malheureusement
, that is another question. We will probably end up doing what the Americans want without even thinking about whether we should. What do
you
think?”

  “I think you’re right. I think it’s too bad. And I think nobody cares what either one of us thinks,” Georges answered.

  Lucien reached for the jug of applejack. “I think that calls for another drink,” he said.

 
C
larence Potter smelled trouble as soon as he walked into Whig headquarters in Charleston. The first thing he did was go over to a neat rank of bottles set against one wall and pour himself a whiskey. Thus armed, he buttonholed Braxton Donovan, who, by his red face, had started drinking quite a while before.

  Donovan was typical of the men in the hall: more than whiskey, which he held well, made him look as if he’d been hit in the head with a club. A speechless lawyer was a novelty Potter had thought he would relish, but he turned out to be wrong.

  “God damn it, snap out of this funk,” Potter said crisply.

  “Why?” Donovan answered, breathing whiskey fumes into his face. “I don’t even know why I’m going through the motions. It’s only March, but you can already see how the Freedom Party is going to kick our ass come November. What’s the use of pretending anything different?”

  “Of course those know-nothing bastards will win—if nobody stands up and tries to stop ’em,” Potter said. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “What can we do? What can anybody do?” Donovan said. “Who’s going to vote for us, with one white man in four out of work? Christ, if I’d lost my job I wouldn’t vote Whig, either.”