The waiter dropped his pencil. 'Be damned,' he said, grunting in pain as he bent to pick it up. He called back to the cook, who was also the owner. 'Hey, Eddie! This fast-talking Yank got Horace off easy!'
'What's 'easy'?' Eddie called back. 'Twenty years? Ten?'
'Six months,' the waiter answered, sounding as excited as Moss. 'And $250.'
'Be damned,' Eddie said, as the waiter had. That impressed him enough to make him come out front. He had on a cloth cap in lieu of the toque a cook at a fancier place might have worn. He tipped it to Moss. 'Lunch on the house, pal.'
'Thanks,' Moss told him.
'You did it,' Eddie said. 'Seems like our own barristers haven't had much luck in Yankee courts. Maybe it takes one to know one.'
That wasn't exactly praise, though the cook no doubt meant it as such. It also wasn't so, or not necessarily. With a sigh, Moss said, 'That fellow they said was a bomber, they threw the book at him no matter what I did.'
'Enoch Dupree, you mean?' the waiter said.
Moss nodded. 'That's right.'
The waiter and Eddie looked at each other. After a long pause, Eddie said, 'Hate to tell you, but Enoch, he was a bomber. I happen to know it for a fact, on account of his brother-in-law's married to my cousin. I-'
'I don't want to hear about it.' Moss held up a hand to show he really meant it. 'My job is to give people the best defense they can get, regardless of whether they're guilty or not.'
'Don't know I much fancy that,' the waiter said. 'Shouldn't be guilty people running around loose just 'cause they've got smart lawyers.'
'Well, your other choice is to send innocent people to jail,' Moss answered. 'How do you like that?'
'I don't, much,' the Canadian answered. 'But I thought it was what you Yanks call justice. Sure has looked like that since you came.'
'You shouldn't blame him,' Eddie said. 'He's done everything he could for us, ever since he hung out his shingle here.'
'That's so,' the waiter admitted, and Moss felt good till the fellow added, 'Sure as hell wish he could do a lot more, though.'
Lucien Galtier sighed as he and Marie and Georges and Jeanne-the last two children left at home-got into his Chevrolet for the Sunday trip to Riviere-du-Loup. 'I'd sooner go to Mass in St.-Antonin or St.-Modeste,' he said, 'but sometimes there's no help for it.'
'Doing this is wise,' his wife said. 'As long as we come to church every so often and let Bishop Pascal see us, everything should be fine.'
'We don't want to give him any reason to complain about us to the Americans, no,' Lucien agreed.
'But the Republic of Quebec is free and independent,' Georges said. 'And if you don't believe me, just ask the first American soldier you see.'
Georges always liked to sound as if he were joking. Sometimes he was. Sometimes… Lucien had learned an English expression: kidding on the square. That summed things up better than anything in Quebecois French.
'You're getting pretty good at this driving business,' Georges went on as they rolled up the paved road past the hospital and toward the town on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. 'Anyone would think you'd been doing it all your life.' He chuckled. 'They'd hardly even invented horses when you were a boy, eh, Papa, let alone motorcars?'
'They hadn't invented such smart alecks, I'll tell you that,' Lucien said. His younger son preened, as if at praise.
The Eglise Saint-Patrice in Riviere-du-Loup was called a cathedral these days, though it was the same building it had always been. Quite a few motorcars parked nearby. Times were… Lucien wouldn't say they were good, but he thought it now and again.
As people filed into the church (being the stubborn Quebecois farmer he was, Galtier refused to think of it as a cathedral, no matter what Bishop Pascal declared), some of them talked about the stocks they'd bought, and about how much money they'd made from them. Lucien felt Marie's eyes on him. Ever so slightly, he shook his head. He'd stayed away from the bourse, and intended to go right on staying away from it. It struck him as being much more like gambling than any legitimate way to make money. Gambling, now, gambling was all very well-so long as you knew you could lose as easily as you could win.
He was almost to the door when he heard the word scandal for the first time. Now he and his wife looked at each other. He shrugged. Marie did the same. A moment later, he heard the word again. Something juicy had happened. And I've been on the farm minding my own business, and so I haven't the faintest idea what it is, he thought regretfully.
'Tabernac,' he muttered. The look Marie sent him this time was definitely reproachful. He pretended not to notice. It wasn't-quite-as if he'd cursed on holy ground. The other side of the door, it would have been a different business.
No sooner had he gone inside than someone else-a woman-said scandal, and immediately started giggling. 'What's going on, mon pere?' Georges asked. Scandal-especially scandal that might be funny-drew him the way maple syrup drew ants.
A young priest named Father Guillaume stood by the altar in Bishop Pascal's place. As Lucien took his seat in the pews, he asked the fellow next to him, a townsman, 'Where's the bishop?'
'Why, with the children, of course,' the man answered, and started to laugh. Lucien fumed. He didn't want to admit he didn't know what was going on. That would make him look like a farmer who came to town only to sell things and to hear Mass. Of course, he was a farmer who came to town only to sell things and to hear Mass, but he didn't want to remind the world of it.
His eldest daughter, Nicole; her husband, the American doctor named Leonard O'Doull; and their son, Lucien, sat down behind his family. He started to lean back and ask them what was so delicious, but Father Guillaume began speaking in Latin just then, so he had to compose himself in patience.
He dared hope the priest's sermon would enlighten him, but it only left him more tantalized and titillated than ever. Father Guillaume talked about those without sin casting the first stone. He praised Pascal, and wished him good fortune in whatever he chose to do with the rest of his life.
Lucien wiggled like a man with a dreadful and embarrassing itch. What ever the scandal was, it must have got Bishop Pascal! He'd never cared for Pascal; the man was too pink, too clever, too… too expedient, to suit him. But Pascal had always come up smelling like a rose-till now. And I don't even know what he did! Galtier thought in an agony of frustration.
He went up and took communion from Father Guillaume. He swallowed the wafer as fast as he could; he didn't want to speak of scandal with the Body of Christ still on his tongue. But then he made a beeline for his son- in-law.
'What? You don't know? Oh, for heaven's sake?' Dr. O'Doull exclaimed. He'd come to Quebec during the war, speaking tolerably good Parisian French. After ten years here, his accent remained noticeable, but only a little. He sounded more as if he'd been born in la belle province-la belle republique, now-every day.
'No, I don't know,' Galtier ground out. 'Since you are such a font of knowledge, suppose you enlighten me.'
'Mais certainement, mon beau-pere,' O'Doull said, grinning. 'Bishop Pascal's lady friend just had twins.'
'Twins!' Lucien said. 'Le bon Dieu!'
'God was indeed good to Bishop Pascal, wouldn't you agree?' his son-in-law said, and laughed out loud. 'I should say, to former Bishop Pascal, for he has resigned his see in light of this… interesting development. Father Guillaume will serve the spiritual needs of Riviere-du-Loup until the see has a new bishop.'
'Twins,' Galtier repeated, as if he'd never heard the word before. 'Yes, I can see how he would have to resign after that.'
No one was surprised when priests had lady friends. They were men of the cloth, yes, but they were also men. A lot of women, down through the years, had sighed over Father, later Bishop, Pascal. Lucien didn't understand it, but he'd never been a woman, either. And few people were astonished if the lady friends of priests sometimes presented them with offspring. That, too, was just one of those things. Life went on, people looked the other way, and the little bastards were often very well brought up.
