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-pиre, 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 Franзaise 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 Riviиre-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 Riviиre-du-Loup to hear Mass. As he'd got into the habit of doing the past few months, he stopped at Йloise 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."