At that point, chaos erupted. Mrs. Egan got up from the table and stormed out of the dining room, pushing the swinging door violently. Next came the happy barking of Locki, the young Labrador that appeared in the room and ran around the table, his claws clacking on the wooden floor, looking for scraps. “Come now!” Robert Egan grumbled, “What’s with all the noise?” Françoise had disappeared into the kitchen. Ashen, the reverend stared at the dog as if afraid of being bitten. Gail caught him by the collar and dragged him into the living room. Teetering, the reverend got up, but Robert Egan caught him by the wrist. “You wouldn’t refuse a good cognac, now, Reverend?”
Half-heartedly, Ralph Barnewall sat back down. Robert Egan was laughing out loud now, as if he was thinking back to one of his favourite jokes. “Catholics! Those damned Catholics!”
Gail, furious with shame at seeing her father so drunk and so impolite, intervened, “Dad!” But Robert Egan continued to chortle with Reverend Barnewall, who’d become rather pale.
“You know what, Reverend? These Catholics … the ones from around here … the women … Well.…” He stopped himself, as if suddenly aware he was going too far. But no, in fact it was comedy, a theatrical gesture to increase his effect, “The poor women, Reverend, they’ve nowhere to get …” He brought his large, resentful face near the Reverend’s, “sanitary tampons!” Ralph Barnewall recoiled and his face burned red.
Gail began to scream, tears of rage in her eyes, in her throat, “Dad, shut up!”
And Robert Egan, as if his daughter was a ghost he couldn’t see, repeated, his head lolling back, making sure his joke had been heard, “Sanitary tampons, Reverend! My wife and my daughter have to stock up in Montreal. Don’t look for them here, they’re impossible to find … as rare as virtue among the girls of the all-American Bar.”
And Gail, again, “Please, shut up!”
Robert Egan leaned towards Ralph Barnewall, something soft and unctuous in the way he moved, like a snail without a shell, “Because they incite women to vice, according to our Catholic friends! Vice, Reverend! Can you imagine all these Catholic women.…”
“You disgust me!” Gail shouted. “Come on, Romain, let’s get out of here.”
9
January 1959, I remember it still. A snowstorm, with heavy, sticky snowflakes falling, a nor’easter blowing. Louis and I had gone to Clifford Wiggs’ place, that old nutter, something that had been formally forbidden. But there was no chance of being seen with the weather the way it was, and the snow and wind hid our tracks. Suddenly excited, Louis began making snowballs with pieces of ice inside, and threw one at an uncovered window of the garage, breaking it in a thousand pieces. Suddenly, laughing madly, he threw another, harder still, and a second window exploded. I yelled at him, and he called me a fag. By the time I got close enough to assess the damage, he’d disappeared, leaving not a trace behind. I couldn’t see a thing through the heavy curtain of snow that the wind made and unmade. He left me there by myself to deal with the consequences, the same as the day I saved Robert Egan from drowning.
Spending time with Louis was asking for trouble. He hated the English ever since his father’s fatal accident at the McArdle sawmill. They refused to compensate his mother, claiming he’d been drunk that day, as was often the case. Louis would never forgive them. His own brand of revenge was to attack their property, anything really, their houses and cars and even animals. I heard he was behind the disappearance of cats, as well as seagulls found broken on the rocky beaches. Killed with a slingshot. Standing before the broken windows, snow blowing in, I could feel anger growing in me, followed by dejection. I was to go back to the seminary in a few days, and return only when summer came. I had had diarrhea that morning, and pain in my stomach all day. Suddenly, from Beach Street, I heard a voice that put ice in my veins: “Hey, you there!”
My heart beating, I turned and saw a young man, a Montreal Canadians tuque on his head.
“You okay, my boy?”
Yes. Why? What do you want from me?
“Seeing you walk in the snowstorm, with your back bent and all, I told myself something was wrong.”
He walked towards me, his long black coat covered with snow, and looked over my shoulder, noticing the broken windows. “Who could have done that?” I felt myself weaken. There was no way he wouldn’t put two and two together. But instead he came back and stood before me, his face serious, as I shook with fear and cold in my heavy clothes, wet with snow. He said, softly, to my great surprise, “The wind, probably. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Good old Wiggs won’t even know about it.” I hesitated when he offered me a cup of tea in his small white church barely visible in the snow — was he making fun of me? One of those churches that was visited by the English, most of them living at Pointe-Leggatt, all descendants of the Scottish immigrants whom John MacNider, the founder of Métis Beach, had convinced to come across in the early nineteenth century. They were people of modest station, like us — people who were from a different world, yet close enough for Fluke to hate us.
He introduced himself: John Kinnear, the new pastor of the United Church, barely twenty-three, with a wife and a baby on the way, his eyes free of judgment and full of laughter. He took my wet clothes and hung them near the sizzling heater in his cramped, spare office, which housed only two chairs and a table. He mentioned he should probably try to do something nicer with it, as if apologizing, but he’d just arrived. The Christmas service had been conducted by his predecessor, an old man with a bulbous nose I’d only seen a few times. He was retired now, but had taken everything with him. The young pastor was laughing, saying he needed to organize everything. We started talking about hockey, and he laughed when I told him we no longer ate Campbell’s soup at home since the riot at the Forum — “Clarence Campbell, Campbell’s soup, my father says the same difference.” The incredible laughter of that friendly man! And in the days to come, as I anxiously awaited my departure for the seminary, I sought his reassurance, confiding in him as I had never done with anyone before — my fears, my anxiety. He was the only person in the world who wasn’t embarrassed when he said the word masturbation. We’d spoken about it one afternoon, for heaven’s sake, and the state I was in … stammering with embarrassment, my words all tumbling out together, telling how Father Bérubé at the seminary forced us to look at his damned Book Without a Title or The Perils of Onanism, a firm arm around our shoulders; sixteen ugly, old etchings, stained in some places, with a young man whose health declines from one picture to the next, until the last shows him emaciated, his body covered with sores, its caption reading, “At seventeen, he expires in terrible pain.”
Once again, that liberating laughter, “It’s nothing but rubbish, Romain. These days, we know that isn’t true. Medicine mentions it as part of the sexual development of an individual, as long as it isn’t done excessively or out of boredom. So, nothing to worry about, right?”
Nothing to worry about? What about those sinister stories repeated over and over by Father Bérubé, with his monkey eyes, his fetid breath, and his damn Book Without a Title under his arm, hammering in the lesson that we were risking eternity, “Earth is a steel ball in the universe.… This ball, every thousand years, a great black bird comes and grazes it with its wing.… When the grazing of the great black bird wears down the entire ball, well, then, it’ll only be the beginning of eternity!”
Once again, the young pastor’s laughter, his hand on my shoulder taking the sting out of the words, “Rubbish, Romain. That’s pure rubbish.”
Rubbish?
The anger I had felt then, a jolt of anger, like two hundred twenty volts through me. All these people lying to me — why?
And I returned to the seminary in Rimouski, revolted but far too scared to show my indignation. So I said nothing, bitterness in me, all of them liars, liars, and worse than liars, if what was said about Gaby Dumont was true. He was the smallest of us, easy prey, soft skin, milky even, not a single hair, not a pimple, almost a girl, that’s what the