The Town Below. Roger Lemelin
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who went about selling photographs of the young parish saint, a recent discovery.
“At least,” they would remark insinuatingly, “we are working for the Lord.”
As Flora was pointing out the site of the confectionery shop which they were about to open for her ailing son, Gaston painfully mounted the stairs that led to the place where he kept his savings, beneath the image of the Sacred Heart. Halfway up, he paused and put out his hand to the hollow of his hip to get his breath. Then he began counting on his fingers: “That makes five times my fingers in dollars, with three dimes. Father says I’ll need ten times my fingers. That takes time.” He sighed, and his sagging shoulders appeared to sink down to his hips. Meanwhile, the gendarme had managed to slip away without being too obvious about it. As he went off whistling, Flora, her eyes flaming, seized Denis by the arm and shook him impatiently as she had done when he was small.
“Leave me alone, will you?” he said. “Don’t be playing that farce about whipping me, to hide your embarrassment. That doesn’t go.”
Flora’s eyes were bloodshot. “Thief! Thief!” she screamed at him. “What shame! We have you educated at a private school so that you can become a clerk in an office, and you’re a bigger rowdy than the worst of the Mulots.”
“I notice you always use my apples for your jelly.” He spilled his booty on the table as the young ones came running up. Then he drew himself sharply erect.
“Yes,” he said aggressively, “that humiliates you in view of your relations with the police. But you are the real thief, for you have stolen Father’s confidence.” He pointed to Noré, who was going down the street.
Mother and son now faced each other threateningly. Theirs was a violent, unrestrained anger, one that revealed the true character of each of them.
If one had not noted a certain bagginess under the eyes, Flora Boucher might have passed for a young woman inclined to stoutness. Her shoulders were square-set and her movements forceful and abrupt, but she was pretty and it was natural for her to laugh when she was not involved in a dispute of some sort. She displayed a certain affectation which rendered her speech all the more picturesque, considering her illiterate working-class background. Since her father had been one of those men of all work who never work, while her mother with ten children to support had been compelled to go from one household to another among the “foreigners” of the Upper Town, she looked upon herself as a woman who had attained a certain rank, a certain social position. She was no longer, or rather she strove not to be any longer, a Mulote. She had arrived; she now belonged to that class of workers who, at Saint-Sauveur, may envisage the possibility of becoming churchwardens and enjoying their day of triumph. A hope that was all the better founded in her case in view of the fact that Joseph Boucher, her husband, was a calm, silent man — and therefore endowed with an air of dignity — whose parents had been middle-class people who had come down in the world.
It was originally intended that he should marry a notary’s daughter who had a dowry of eight hundred dollars. (Flora always spoke of this young woman with a contemptuous curl of her lips.) But Joseph Boucher, alas, had been born with a roving disposition and had left school to go and live in the west. Having come back to Quebec stranded, some years later, he had met Flora in the Saint-Sauveur quarter while searching for a dog which had been stolen from his aunt, a lady of means. (In speaking to the neighbouring women, Madame Boucher would frequently mention inheritances that were soon to be expected from her husband’s side of the family.) Despite his unstable temperament and because he was so sentimental and passionate, Denis’s father had quickly fallen love with Flora’s brown eyes, her coquettish ways, and her lively and exotic mannerisms; and she did indeed possess a keen intelligence and a heart of gold. When Joseph first met her, she was just recovering from the pain she had experienced in dismissing a certain jealous and exacting suitor — the same Noré, now a Saint-Joseph gendarme. She had shed many tears over it, even though the years that they had gone about together had been stormy ones.
And so Joseph, an expert in psychological sedatives, had at once begun flooding her with his free-verse compositions. How splendid! A poet all her own who could cause her to forget her sorrow! But Flora’s father, a practical-minded drunkard, was unable to see a possible drinking companion in his daughter’s “young man.” Of an evening, he would spy upon Joseph from behind his newspaper, stealing a glance at the pictures now and then, since he could not read. This young fellow was for him an antipathetic enigma, an unsociable individual with long slender hands and a pale face. By way of getting him out of the house at an early hour, he would hover around the grandfather clock, winding it energetically and coughing all the while. Then he would take off his slippers, hold them side by side in his hand, and wait.
“That lad, my girl, is too easygoing,” he would say. “He’s too sweet on you. If he doesn’t work, he has no business wanting to marry you. I’ll have to give him his walking papers.”
Inasmuch as his prospective father-in-law was near to being a colossus, Joseph was led to reflect that perhaps it would be better for him to look for a job. He would hang about the corridors of the Parliament Buildings and, just as Flora’s sisters were returning from work, would come out with a bustling air and a newspaper under his arm. Then came the war. He did the heroic thing and enlisted, and this act of gallantry on his part resulted in his being married, in view of the allotment his wife would receive. As soon as the armistice was signed, he had gone to work on the construction gang in the grain elevators along the wharf and after that had become permanently employed. His family circle today, comprising ten children, was apparently complete, and Madame Boucher with great magnanimity would distribute heaps of baby clothes to young married couples. As the tots came, Joseph had taken on a crabbed mien. There was nothing of the vers-libriste about him any longer; he rather resembled a tree that with the coming of autumn had shed its flowers, fruit, and leaves. The mother, on the other hand, seemed to blossom out, and for each new angle that became visible on her husband’s body it was as if a new curve made its appearance on hers.
As she was screaming to her son that she was a respectable woman, voices were heard calling Denis from the yard.
“That’s right,” shouted Flora, “go on to your Mulots. Ignorant lot! That Jean Colin who was born two months after his parents were married. Everybody knows what La Barloute, his mother, is.”
She began peeling the apples that had been left on the table as Colin and the Langevins gathered around Denis, and Gaston came out to join them. Denis, astonished to see them so agitated, gazed at each of them in turn. Jean, especially, was unable to stand still.
“It’s almost unbelievable,” he said. “Just imagine —” He broke off as he saw Madame Boucher, who had come to the doorway to listen. “Come over to the shed.”
They had crossed the street, for the Colins lived directly opposite the Bouchers. Gaston followed them as best he could, putting into each breath he took all the energy that a feeble person expends in trying to keep up with the others; he was breathing harder and more painfully all the time. The “shed” was a tumble-down coach house that was rotting from the ground up — how it remained standing was a miracle.
“Let’s sit in the victoria,” suggested Robert Langevin, the lazy one.
The victoria stood in the centre of the shed, as black and memory-laden as a coffin on wheels. Jean’s grandfather Colin, old man Pitou, had been a coachman for the tourist trade and it was the family’s title to fame to have an ancestor who had driven American millionaires about.
“Let’s help ourselves from the buffet,” said Jean, lifting up the carriage seat. There were the stolen apples. He watched the leader out of the corner of his eye, enjoying Denis’s curiosity. Finally he could contain himself no longer. “It was a girl who hid us,” he said. “And a pretty one!” he added in an enthusiastic tone of voice.
Denis frowned. “Who was she?”
“Père Lévesque’s girl. You know, the educated one, who was away at the convent.”
“Who is that?” asked Germaine Colin, who had just come in with a bundle under her arm. Denis gave her a look.