Riviиre-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, Riviиre-du-Loup seemed even larger than it was. Plenty of farm families from the countryside had come in to hear Mass at the Eglise 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 Riviиre-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 pиre?" 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 Riviиre-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 Riviиre-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 Riviиre-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?"
"I don't know." Lucien took another sip. Fire ran down his throat. "It will make a man drunk, certainement. But if I have a choice between drinking something that tastes of apples and something that tastes of burnt wood, I know which I would choose most of the time."
"If you want it, I have some real Calvados, not the bootleg hooch you pour down," O'Doull said.
"Maybe later," Galtier replied. "I did tell you, most of the time. For now, for a change, the whiskey is fine." He took another sip. Smacking his lips thoughtfully, he said, "I wonder how people came to savor the taste of burnt wood in the first place."