A lot of women who worked in the galoshes factory were widows, some still wearing mourning, others not. Most of them, like Sylvia, heartily despised the foreman. “Like to put a certain part of him in the mold—the size-two mold,” Sarah Wyckoff, one of those widows, said at dinner on a day when Best was being particularly obnoxious. “Wouldn’t need nothin’ bigger.”
That produced a good set of giggles. Sylvia said, “No, for goodness’ sake, you don’t want him vulcanized
there
. He’d never keep quiet about it then.” More giggles rose.
“If so many of us hate him,” said May Cavendish, another widow, “why does
he
think he’s so bully?”
“He’s a man,” Sarah Wyckoff said, as if she expected that to cover everything. By the way the other women nodded, it probably did.
May Cavendish tossed her head; her blond curls bounced on her shoulders. “What frosts me is that some of the girls
do
like him.”
“I can’t imagine that anybody would really
like
him,” Sylvia said with a shudder. Her companions nodded. She went on, “But if he says, ‘Be nice to me or go look for another job,’ some of the girls are going to be nice to him. Times are hard. Believe me, I know.”
“We all know, sweetheart,” Sarah said. “If he said anything like that to me, though, I’d break him in half.” She was built like a longshoreman; Sylvia didn’t think she meant it any way but literally.
“There ought to be a law,” Sylvia said. She’d had that thought before, when she lost her job at the canning plant because she’d had to stay home and tend to her children after they came down with the chicken pox.
“There ought to be a lot of things that there ain’t,” Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. “If I was Teddy Roosevelt—”
“You’d look silly with a mustache, Sarah, and you haven’t got enough teeth to be TR,” May Cavendish said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, scraped a match on the sole of her shoe, got the cigarette lighted, and blew out a creditable smoke ring. Then she coughed. “Sorry. I’m still getting the hang of this.”
“Doesn’t it make people think you’re fast?” Sylvia asked.
May shook her head. “Not the way it would have before the war,” she said, and drew on the cigarette again. The coal glowed red. She let the smoke go without showing off this time. “It’s not like it’s a big, smelly cigar or anything. It’s not like it was hooch, either. You don’t get drunk or anything—you feel better about things for a little while, that’s all.” She extended the pack toward Sylvia. “Want to try one?”
“Sure. Why not?” Sylvia said. “It’s not like they can hurt you or anything.” She took a cigarette. May Cavendish struck another match. Sylvia didn’t drag deeply on the cigarette, the way May had done. She drew in a cautious mouthful of smoke—or so she thought. When she tried to suck it down into her lungs, she hacked and wheezed and started to choke.
“Very same thing happened to me the first time I tried,” May assured her. “It gets easier, believe me it does. You get used to it.”
Sylvia’s mouth tasted as if someone had just doused a campfire in there. She stared at the cigarette in dismay. “Why would you want to get used to it?” she asked, and coughed again. But she felt tingly all the way out to her fingers and toes, tingly and light-headed in a strange and pleasant sort of way. Ever so cautiously, she took another puff.
It still tasted bad. It made her chest burn. But the tingles and that good feeling in the middle of her brain got stronger.
“Don’t do too much the first time,” May Cavendish advised her. “You can get sick if you do. Think about whether you like it or not. It’s not like cigarettes are expensive, or anything like that.”
“That’s true,” Sylvia said. “They’ve come down since the war ended, too. I’ve noticed that, even if I don’t usually buy them.”
May nodded. “And the tobacco’s better now. It’s the one good thing you can say about the Rebs—they grow better tobacco than we do. Some of the stuff they were selling while the war was still on…Honey, I swear to Jesus they were sweeping the horseballs off the street and wrapping paper around ’em.”
“People kept smoking, though,” Sarah Wyckoff said.
“Why not?” Sylvia said. “It’s not a bad thing, and May’s right—it does make you feel nice for a little bit.” Despite saying that, she had no great urge to smoke the rest of the cigarette May Cavendish had given her. She let it fall to the ground and crushed it with her foot. Maybe she’d acquire the habit and maybe she wouldn’t. If she did, she’d do it slowly. If she tried to do it in a hurry, she had the feeling she would get sick instead.
“Time to get back to work,” Sarah said, “or Frank’ll start sweet-talking us again.” She rolled her eyes to show how much she looked forward to that.
When Sylvia went back into the plant, it didn’t stink so badly of rubber, or so it seemed. After a while, she realized the cigarette had numbed her sense of smell. That seemed a good reason to start smoking all by itself.
The line began to move. Sylvia painted red rings on a pair of galoshes. The machinery sent them down the line to the next worker, who would trim off extra rubber. Sylvia dipped her brush in the paint can and painted more rings.
Lucien Galtier was the sort to enjoy summer while it lasted. Up here, close to the St. Lawrence, a few miles outside the town of Rivière-du-Loup, it did not last long. The farmer did not hold that against summer. It was what it was. He accepted along with enjoying.
He accepted weeds, too, but he did not enjoy them. At the moment, he was hoeing the potato patch. When he saw a bit of green of the wrong shade and in the wrong place, the hoe lashed out without his conscious direction. The decapitated weed toppled.
“Strike them all dead,
cher papa,
” Lucien’s son, Georges, said from a couple of rows over, seeing the hoe come down. At eighteen, Georges overtopped his father by several inches, and was wider through the shoulders, too—Lucien’s strength was of the wiry, enduring sort. Georges’ humor was also wider than his father’s; he enjoyed playing the buffoon, while Lucien met the world with irony.
“Strike them all dead, eh?” Lucien said as he got rid of another weed. “One fine day, my son, you will make your country a fine general.”
“If the Republic of Quebec needs
me
as a general, it will be in a great deal of trouble,” Georges said with conviction. He looked down at the ground. “Come on, you weeds—get out of the potato trenches and charge the machine guns! Die, and save me the trouble of grubbing you out.” Beaming at Lucien, he went on, “Perhaps you have reason. I can talk like a general,
n’est-ce pas?
”
His father snorted. “As always, you are a nonpareil.” He bent his back to the weeding, not wanting Georges to see any surprise on his face. He’d forgotten, as he sometimes could in the daily routine of farm life, that this was, and had been for the past year and more, the Republic of Quebec, dancing attendance on the United States, and not the province of Quebec, a French-speaking appendage to the British Empire.
He laughed—at himself, as he often did. He’d forgotten the American-fostered Republic of Quebec, and that with an American son-in-law. There was absentmindedness worthy of a professor or a priest.
When he straightened again, he glanced over in the direction of the hospital the Americans had built on his land to care for their wounded from the fighting north of the St. Lawrence. The hospital remained, but no longer flew the Stars and Stripes. Instead, the Republic’s flag (which had also been the provincial flag) floated above it: a field of blue quartered by a white cross, and in each quadrant a white fleur-de-lys. These days, the hospital drew its patients from the people of Quebec.
As the sun went down, he and Georges shouldered their hoes like rifles and trudged back toward the farmhouse. A Ford was parked by the house: not one in a coat of green-gray U.S. official paint, nor the Republic’s equivalent blue-gray, but somber civilian black. Georges grinned when he saw it. “Ah, good,” he said. “My sister is here for me to harass.”
“Yes, and her husband is here to give you what you deserve for harassing her, too,” Lucien replied, to which his son responded with a magnificent Gallic shrug.
Charles, Georges’ older brother, came out of the barn just as Lucien and Georges headed toward it to hang the hoes on the rack Lucien’s grandfather had built long years before. Charles looked like Lucien, but was more sobersided—he had to take after his mother there.
Marie greeted her husband and sons on the front porch, as much to make sure they wiped their feet as for any other reason. She was a small, dark, sensible woman, ideally suited to be a farm wife. Her younger daughters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne, who ranged in age from sixteen down to eleven, also came out. Susanne sixteen! Galtier shook his head. She had been a child when the war started. Seeing her ripening figure forcibly reminded him she was a child no longer.
Lucien waded through his younger daughters to give Nicole a hug. She looked very much the way Marie had as a young wife. She also looked happy, which made her father happy in turn. When she turned Lucien loose, he shook his son-in-law’s hand. “And how does it march with you, the distinguished Dr. O’Doull?” he asked.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull looked back over his shoulder, as if to see whether Galtier were speaking to someone behind him. With a chuckle, he answered, “It marches well enough with me,
mon beau-père
. And with you?”
“Oh, with me?” Galtier said lightly as he got out a jug of the applejack one of his neighbors—most unofficially—cooked up. “It is good of you to ask. It is good of you to deign to visit my home here, instead of returning to the palace in which you dwell in Rivière-du-Loup.”
“Father!” Nicole said indignantly.
“Be calm, my sweet,” Leonard O’Doull said, laughter in his green eyes. “He was trying to make you squeak, and he did it.” He’d spoken French—Parisian French—before he came up to Quebec. He still spoke Parisian French, but now with a heavy Quebecois overlay. In another few years, he would probably sound like someone who’d grown up here.
Nicole sniffed. “I expected such behavior from my brother, not from my own dear papa.” She laid the treacle on with a trowel. Her eyes glowed.
“Why?” Georges asked innocently. “What did you expect Charles to do?” That set Nicole to spluttering, Charles to glaring, and the young ladies of the family to chaffing both their brothers impartially.
In the midst of that racket, Lucien spoke more seriously to Dr. O’Doull: “It is always good to see you.” He handed his son-in-law a glass of the apple brandy. “To your health.”
“And to yours,” O’Doull said. They drank. Galtier gasped a little as the applejack clawed its way down to his belly: this was a rougher batch than most his neighbor made. If it fazed Leonard O’Doull, he didn’t let on. Irishmen were supposed to have well-tempered gullets, and he lived up to that. After another sip, he went on, “Nicole and I finished our work at about the same time, and we thought we would pay you a visit.”
“You should have such thoughts more often,” Galtier said, but then qualified that by adding, “Are you certain it has been good for Nicole to continue to work instead of keeping house full time?”
“She has become a good nurse,” O’Doull answered, “and the hospital would be the poorer if it lost her. And she desires to work, and I, believe me, I am perfectly happy with the way she keeps house.”
“So long as a man is happy, everything will march well,” Lucien said gravely, and his son-in-law nodded. The farmer raised an eyebrow. “Is it for this reason—to boast of your happiness—that you do us the honor of this visit?”
“By no means.” O’Doull could match Georges absurdity for absurdity and Lucien dry for dry. “It is because a little bird whispered in my ear that Nicole’s mother was fixing a great stew of
lapins aux pruneaux
.”
“Ah, is that the reason?” Lucien slowly nodded. “Very well. Very well indeed, in fact. The rabbits think I set the cabbages there for them to enjoy. I, on the other hand, think God put the rabbits there for me to enjoy. After you taste of the stew”—whose hot, meaty odor filled the farmhouse—“you will decide.”
“Any rabbit who presumes to taste of your cabbages surely deserves to end up
aux pruneaux
,” his son-in-law agreed with a face so perfectly straight that Galtier, well pleased, elbowed him in the ribs as if he were a son of his own flesh and poured him another glass of the homemade Calvados.
The meal was a great success. Afterwards, Nicole helped her mother and sisters with the dishes—with so many hands, the work could not help being light. O’Doull handed fragrant Habanas to Lucien and his sons and lit one for himself. Galtier savored the aroma before drawing the first sweet smoke from his own panatela. He whistled.
“Tabernac,”
he said reverently. “By the tobacco they grow there, Habana must be very close to Paradise.”
“Closest part of the Confederate States, anyhow, not that that’s saying much,” Dr. O’Doull replied.
Charles said nothing, which was not surprising. Georges said nothing, which was an astonishment. Both young men puffed happy clouds. So did Lucien. He could not recall the last time he’d been more content, at least outside the marriage bed.
And then another astonishment took place: Nicole came out of the kitchen, followed by Marie and Susanne and Denise and Jeanne. Galtier did not find that an astonishment of the pleasant sort; custom was that the women let their menfolk linger over liquor and tobacco. He reckoned that a good custom, one in no need of breaking. “What’s this?” he asked. “A parade?”
“No,
cher papa,
only something I have to tell you—something I have to tell everyone,” Nicole said. “Everyone except Leonard, that is, for he knows.” Even by the ruddy light of kerosene lamps, Lucien could see her blush. He knew then what was coming, knew it before she spoke: “
Cher papa, cher maman,
you will be grandparents next year.”
“A grandfather?” Lucien exclaimed. Even knowing what was coming, he found himself surprised.
But I am too young to be a grandfather!
he wanted to cry. Foolishness, of course: if he had a married daughter, he was not too young to be a grandfather. Still, he felt as if he were.