Father Leblanc eventually opened up, looked at me somewhat disbelievingly and wedged himself up against the door frame. The wine on his breath preceded the man himself by a good few feet. Unsteady on his legs, he leaned on the door handle, which did a valiant job of keeping him upright.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, Father, but I need to speak to someone.’
‘In truth, I’m not in a condition to be someone at the moment, mademoiselle Day.’
‘Garant. My name is Catherine Garant. Marie Garant was my mother.’
He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Are you here to pray or to gossip?’
We both stood there, hands against the door frame, me trying to talk my way in, him attempting to shoo me away.
‘I shouldn’t have told that white lie about my name. I hope you’ll forgive me. I… I’m going through a rough patch. I came out here to the Gaspé to meet my mother, but… she’s dead. I… I don’t have any answers and I… I feel alone.’
‘What do you want me to do about it?’
‘I don’t know… Ask me in? You did take a vow—’
‘The only vow I took, mademoiselle Garant, was to be able to enjoy my drink in peace and quiet before I go to bed!’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘In truth, it happens. Even to alcoholics. But you’re not going to hold seeking a remedy for misery against me, are you – is that why you’re knocking at my door in the middle of the night?’
I hesitated for a second, just long enough to lose my patience. Then I climbed right back onto my high horse.
‘Well actually I am, Father! Your drink can wait until tomorrow! Because I’ve been paying my tithes all my life to a church I’ve never set foot in, and the one night that I come asking for help, you’re not going to leave me out in the cold! The rest of the year, you can knock back as much as you please, but tonight, it’s out of the question for a man of God to hide behind his wine bar of an altar and deny me—’
‘Deny you what, my dear child?’
‘An explanation! I came to the Gaspé to meet my mother, my father, a lover – someone! Someone who has answers! But no one’s here and I’m left empty-handed. And now even you don’t want to talk to me!’
He let go of the groaning handle and took five steps backward to sit down on the staircase. He sighed. Heavy feet had taken their toll on the stairs. There were finger marks along the handrail and the grooves in the wood suggested cats had used it to claw their way upstairs. The walls were painted that tired pale shade decorators call off-white. If you ask me, it’s a drab, dirty white. A miserable white. Father Leblanc’s black clothes blended in with the whole setting: wrinkled trousers with a worn-out belt; shabby shirt with an unsavoury priest’s collar.
‘Catherine, you’re knocking on the wrong door.’
‘Renaud told me a priest had blessed his house and that ever since then…’
He wiped a wrinkled hand across his balding forehead and his expression turned into one of compassion. At last, I thought.
‘Is that what you want, a miracle? In truth, you show up here at silly o’clock with your little white lies, as sorry as a winter sea, and you want me to bless you to help you sleep tight?! Yet who, my poor child, sleeps peacefully these days? Who? Name one person who can get a good night’s sleep!’
‘I don’t understand.’
He stood up, evidently ushering me back to the other side of the glass door.
‘That’s the mystery of faith: we don’t understand, but we keep on living anyway!’
‘You can’t fool me with your mysteries.’
‘Fool you? Go back home, Catherine Day, daughter of Marie Garant. The mystery is real, but you may sleep in peace now: in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, you are saved!’
‘Hallelujah?’
‘Stop searching and appreciate that life is something we’re lucky to have! Love a man, bear a child, or follow in your mother’s footsteps and take off somewhere, but just do it without me!’
He pushed me towards the door more firmly than I would have thought he was capable of. Retreating, despite my resolve, I played my final card.
‘My mother has just died and that’s the best you can come up with?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, tell me about my father! Who was he?’
‘I won’t lie to you, Catherine – you no longer have a mother and the only father you’ll find here is God. And now, this father has nothing more to say!’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Goodnight to you!’
He closed the door, and I was left bathing in the yellowish halo of the dirty lamp. The fly was still there, bashing into the sizzling bulb in its futile attempts to escape the fishbowl.
Yves Carle barely slept anymore, not since a certain woman had toyed with his heart. He was a moocher. Fifteen years it had been going on, and Thérèse said it was worse in the winter.
‘It’s intolerable!’ she would say. ‘And it can’t be good for your health, either!’
He would just shrug his shoulders and throw his arms to the sky. ‘You’re fretting for nothing! After three bypasses, my heart’s made of Teflon!’ Then he’d give her that tender, almost timid, smile he knew she couldn’t resist. ‘You’re not going to ask me for a divorce, then?’ he would tease.
‘Are you nuts?! We’re way too old to get divorced! It’d be far too much trouble!’
And so, each night, at the darkest of hours, when the hands on the clock turned to the right, Yves Carle would wake up, stare at the ceiling, note Thérèse’s nocturnal breathing and get out of bed to start his day.
As winter turned to spring, Yves would wait for the ice to melt, like a maple expects the sap. Through the fog of April, he would keep watch. Stationed on his deck, he would patiently await the opening of the waters – for when the summer would fill the sea with abandon. He was used to it after all these years. At last, when the Milky Way was showing him the course he should take, he would hoist his sails and return only once he saw the fishermen set out to sea.
Thérèse said that was no better than in winter, that she would wake in the early hours and worry something might happen to him. After all, she added, no matter how old they were, ‘men could never let women sleep in peace!’
The night I knocked in vain at the Lord’s door, Yves Carle went to sea. Struck with insomnia in the wee hours by the clock hands, he cast off his earthly ties and hoisted his curtain of a mainsail beneath the starry firmament. The moon was shining in its full glory and he knew what he was looking for.
He had heard about Marie Garant’s body being found and that was all he could think about. Marie snagged in a net. And Pilar? Sunk? Yves Carle had been picturing the boat upside down, its sails underwater, rigged and heavy. And everything else: plates and plastic glasses floating in the upside-down hull; tools, maps and navigation dividers floating in the drink, bashing up against the side walls; the floorboards peeling away… Pilar sunk? But there hadn’t been enough knots in the wind to even make the sailboat lean, and if the hull had been leaking, Marie would have called the coast guard. Unless she had fallen overboard and Pilar had carried on along her course without her skipper…