River City Read online

  RIVER CITY

  A NOVEL

  JOHN FARROW

  FOR JACQUES CINQ-MARS,

  1920–, CAPTAIN OF THE NIGHT PATROL (RETIRED),

  WHO FOUGHT;

  AND IN MEMORY OF JOSEPH GUIBORD,

  1808-1869 (BURIED 1875),

  WHO THOUGHT.

  The earth in its devotion carries all things,

  good and evil, without exception.

  —I CHING

  If this sprawling half-continent has a heart, here it is.

  —TWO SOLITUDES, HUGH MACLENNAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER 1: TIME IMMEMORIAL

  CHAPTER 2: 1971 ~ 1955 ~ 1939 ~ 1821 ~ 1535

  CHAPTER 3: 1955

  CHAPTER 4: 1535 ~ 1534 ~ 1535–36

  CHAPTER 5: 1955

  CHAPTER 6: 1608–09 ~ 1611 ~ 1628

  CHAPTER 7: 1955

  CHAPTER 8: 1640–42

  CHAPTER 9: 1955

  CHAPTER 10: 1642–65

  CHAPTER 11: 1955

  CHAPTER 12: 1684 ~ 1714

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER 13: 1958

  CHAPTER 14: 1728–29 ~ 1734

  CHAPTER 15: 1968

  CHAPTER 16: 1847 ~ 1859

  CHAPTER 17: 1968

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER 18: 1937

  CHAPTER 19: 1968

  CHAPTER 20: 1939

  CHAPTER 21: 1968–69

  CHAPTER 22: 1941–47

  CHAPTER 23: 1970

  CHAPTER 24: 1947–49

  CHAPTER 25: 1970

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27: 1970

  CHAPTER 28: 1970–71

  CHAPTER 29: 1971

  CHAPTER 30: 1971

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  TIME IMMEMORIAL

  THROUGH SPACE, TIME AND DEVASTATION, LAND FORMS.

  Foursquare, sheer, the cliffs of a muscled terrain stand stalwart to the sea, their dawn shadow a broad river’s awning. Tilting northeast, the strata of rock ascend steeply, legacy of a time when rock ripped from rock in fire and blast and polar shift, continent from continent, plates skid loose and from the rupture a hard surface arose from an ocean’s buckled floor.

  A northerly forge.

  Land heaves. Erupts. Ground rolls, in agony sways, then rests awhile.

  Along the shore of what would become a grand estuary to and from the sea, three hundred and fifty million voyages around the sun before the diminutive, pale Frenchman Jacques Cartier anchored on the spot, a meteor’s impact shattered the earth’s crust. As measured in a future epoch, a crater punched a plateau fifty-four kilometres in diameter. Away from the epicentre, the surface crumpled into mountainous waves.

  Over eons, the dazed planet wobbled back from the blow.

  In another time, the hills were struck again, albeit mildly, a deep, circular lake the residual souvenir.

  Upon the plains south of the great river, hills took shape as glacial deposits, the prodigious ebb of tidal ice scrapping rocks into giant rogue waves before setting them gently down at select locations, marking the passage of sluggish time in ceremonial nubs. North of the fault line delineated by the river, ancient rock eroded under the stress of the elements. The oldest mountain range on the continent slumped nearer to the level of the sea again, debilitated by age, in summer mere green hills and under a winter’s blanket windswept creases.

  One peak formed from vacant space. An empty volcanic crater, backfilled by glacial debris, compressed by ice miles high. The ice receded, the outer lava mould washed away. The tougher inner plug revealed itself and remained ever the more tenacious, a scrap heap of rock to be anointed in time as a royal mountain.

  The warm melt of glaciers, the fall of winter snows, the rains of spring and the thunderclaps of summer storms conspired to create a green land. Rivers etched the landscape. Lakes became plentiful. Fish swam the freshwater currents or lazed in the arbour of shoreline trees. Bear and moose, lynx, wolf and deer prospered and found their balance. Caribou roamed the northern pelt. A crafty, industrious creature, the beaver, dammed streams and ponds and constructed community lodges from sticks that rose above the water, altering the landscape for those who depended upon its engineering acumen.

  The land’s genius lay in its waterways. Loon alighted each spring, forerunner to waterfowl that would arrive and go in great masses to dapple along the shores or dive to the depths of cold lakes. Upon the rivers appeared the first people, eleven thousand migrations around the sun before the present moment, as glaciers receded. Russet-skinned and curious, they travelled in tune to the seasons as did the birds, and a few tribes learned to cope with the vigour of enduring winters. In the far north, the people lived along the shore of an immense saltwater bay, an ocean of ice, where they fished through short, bright summers and in the forests through sunless months trapped and hunted the four-leggeds. They chose to live where the land was unforgiving, where peaceable lives could prosper.

  Generations lapsed in this way, one folded upon another.

  Where the forests and rivers were generous, the weathers becoming less extreme, tribes competed for land. Those who spoke the language of the Iroquois roamed the great inland waterway and along the rivers and lakes south. To the west dwelled proud Huron and Algonquin, and to the north ruddy Montagnais. They fought the Iroquois when one tribe encroached upon another, and battled for rivers and lakes, for shorelines, for whole forests, and at times the wars were great furies and at other times mere skirmishes among rowdy young men anxious to test their mettle. Generations lapsed in this way, striving to persist.

  Time immemorial, so it seemed, lapsed in this way, striving to persist.

  CHAPTER 2

  1971 ~ 1955 ~ 1939 ~ 1821 ~ 1535

  BY MOONLIGHT, TWO WOMEN MOVED AMONG TREES DOWN A STEEP escarpment. Tricky going by daylight, riskier at night. They lugged shovels. A small dog scampered on ahead. Burdened by a backpack, the younger woman used her spade to leap a narrow stream of snowmelt, then stretched out the handle for the eldest to balance herself, pause, and traverse the ditch with a bound. A slippery ascent came next. Against a broad horizontal limb just off the ground at the hill’s crest, they sagged, gasping, and caught their breath.

  Both waited there. Glanced around.

  Then looked at one another.

  “Ready?” the elder asked.

  The two wore black.

  “Ready,” the younger responded. Together they groped for a channel through a thicket, scant light reflecting upon patches of snow and ice that had persevered, concealed from noonday suns. On all fours, they scrabbled over the humps of keening grey boulders, their bare lives suddenly exposed.

  And entered a silent stand of protective trees.

  The women diverged from the customary trails. None were intended for a night passage. They moved wherever their trespass would be the most concealed. Down from the mountain they tramped and skidded, the pooch going on ahead, away from the upper cemetery towards a mid-sized American automobile, maroon, borrowed, a Dodge or Plymouth, parked and empty amid boulders and a cluster of evergreens off the main road that traversed the mountain.

  By a culvert, where the mountain’s runoff was strong, they cleaned fresh clay from their long-handled spades. When accidentally the pair banged tips, the echo resounded off a face of rising rock and down across the meadows of the dead.

  The breath of their exertion billowed in the cool air. Two women and a dog, departing a cemetery in the d
ark with shovels. What could they have been doing …

  … in the year 1971?

  The first warmish winds of the season whooshed down from wooded hills, crisscrossing the still-snowy fields of March all sodden from a swift melt. Black loam showed through in patches. Chickadees chased their tail feathers through cedars and bare maples as animals, both domestic and wild, twitched their nostrils at the secret scent, eyes blinking, the earth’s scuttlebutt decoded: spring.

  Sniffing fresh mud stink, the boy felt it, too. As if regaining faith in a neglected deity, he sensed the possibility of summer again: free time—no school!—and games, swimming behind the creek dam, riding a horse into—this year, perhaps beyond—the woodlands. Although the promise of that paradise riddled his senses, the mood did not linger long. By evening, rowdy winds shook the shutters and whistled around the upper dormers of the home in which he had been born, the home in which his father had also been born in Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur-de-Wolfestown, Quebec. Yet the boy’s interest in one season’s discourse with another had flagged. The game was on the radio. The game! The playoffs were almost at hand. Now was the time to catch every static-encrusted syllable and root for his home team. Now was the time to be consumed by his winter passion—skate, check, pass, shoot, score, in his head, alongside his hockey heroes.

  “A goal?” the boy’s father inquired, not fully removing the pipe from his mouth but taking up the weight of the bowl in his left hand to speak properly. From Quebec City, Le Soleil lay folded on his lap as he caught up on world news in the comfort of an armchair, the big, floppy one with the faded burgundy print of immense roses. A floor lamp’s shade, tinted with roses also, these a pastel mauve and a faded yellow, lurched over his left shoulder. Soft light illuminated the pages. The bookcase, built with his own hands into both corners of the wall behind his chair, reached from his knees to the high ceiling and included a short ladder made from the wood of a crabapple tree to assist browsing the higher shelves. Quaint, magisterial, a grandfather clock would have been heard ticking by the father and son had they not turned the radio’s volume up so high.

  The voice of Albert Cinq-Mars sounded sympathetically gloomy, and the knit of his brow denoted a worry. His son reacted poorly to enemy goals, and in the background the crowd’s roar was apparent. The game was underway in Boston—that Bruins fans cheered did not bode well for les Canadiens, Montreal’s home team.

  “A fight, Papa,” the eleven-year-old on the floor stipulated. “It’s the Rocket.”

  “Mmm.” His father’s eyes and mind returned to the paper.

  The boy shifted onto his back while he absorbed details of the brawl. Could he ever battle that way, or would courage fail him? He enjoyed rough-house play as much as any boy, but being in a real scrap was difficult to imagine. Getting beaten up worried him—what could that be like?—but Émile was also afraid of going berserk, punching a boy and, having hit him and hurt him, doing it again. He’d seen others do it in the schoolyard, but could he make someone bleed and cry and, once his foe was bloody and weeping, keep on punching? He was bigger than most boys his age. Would he instead offer his opponent a hand up, a Kleenex for his tears and a sympathetic comment? One of life’s curious mysteries.

  Just then, a word broke through the roaring and the static that drew his father’s disapproving attention back to the game. “Sticks?”

  “Over-the-head swings—two!” Émile announced, spinning onto his derrière. He immediately updated himself with the announcer’s next words. “Three times! The Rocket! Three times he’s hit him with a stick! He’s got a teammate’s, Papa! He already broke his stick across that other guy’s back. He must be pretty damn mad!”

  Dismayed, his father shook his head. Grown men, fighting, on skates. With sticks. Barbaric. Yet he plucked the pipe from his mouth and leaned in more closely to the radio. No ordinary punch-up. The game’s greatest player—for all Quebecers were agreed on that—the legendary Maurice “Rocket” Richard, had swung a stick three times across an opponent’s back, connecting with each fierce swipe.

  “Don’t say damn,” he gently reproved his son.

  “Sorry.”

  “He’ll be thrown out,” Albert Cinq-Mars forewarned.

  The boy made a chopping motion as though administering the blows himself.

  Then the radio commentator announced that, in the melee, the Rocket had punched an official.

  “A big fine,” the father persisted. “This will cost him. He’ll be suspended for a few games, you watch.” Attentive, he continued to lean forward, although he could never have reconnoitred that the political shape of a nation turned on these events.

  “How can the Rocket miss a game? The scoring championship! He’s so close.”

  “Kiss it goodbye now. Not that it matters. The Cup’s the main thing.”

  “I guess so,” the boy relented. He felt dejected to think that the Rocket may have blown his chance at the scoring championship, the one feat that had eluded him throughout his career. Incapable of foretelling the future, he could not have guessed that the Cup was now lost also, or that history-making events would soon transpire. As the loss of an individual scoring title was rendered insignificant by the quest for the team trophy, so would that trophy, the glorious, mythic Stanley Cup, emblematic of hockey supremacy, be overshadowed by time’s conniving winds.

  Young Émile, intently listening in, had assumed that the game was hockey—only hockey, and just a game. Over time, he would learn that he’d been eavesdropping on history in the making, that the fracas on the ice, of the sort that could erupt anytime, anywhere, among any number of players in the sport, would ignite the passions of a people, his people, never to be forgotten over the course of his lifetime, that the cultural fabric of his society was being knit with each swing of the stick …

  … in the year 1955.

  On the first day of September, deeply inebriated and almost naked, the premier of the province of Quebec sat in a plush leather chair in the tower of an immense, elegant, Old World hotel, the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. He discussed with a young woman the matter of her virtue. Fetching, yet admirably hesitant, the young lady from the legislature’s secretarial pool presented a half-moon face to him, the hidden portion darkened by brown curls that sprang back to her scalp whenever he gave them a tug. When they’d met, he’d pulled a curl before saying hello, and she had looked at him through her one uncovered eye, revealing a half-smile. She’d not yet consented to the fulfillment of their liaison, and had declined to unfasten all her clothing—determined, it appeared, to remain perpetually in half-shadow.

  In advance of her compliance, the young lady needed to ascertain the level of this man’s faithful interest. In the oratorical gusto for which he was renowned, the premier had roared back, “Not only do I not love you, my beauty, but I never shall, nor will I marry you! What else do you wish to hear, sweet girl, to be convinced of my fidelity in this matter? You are, I suppose, with your flashing green eyes and soft pink skin, a lovely creature. I am Maurice Duplessis—le Chef! The soul of the French people! I wish to sink my teeth into you—yet draw no blood, impart no serious impression. What more could you possibly need to know, Mademoiselle?”

  “Sir. Yes. For instance, do you know who I am?” pleaded the young woman.

  “Of course! You’re … Charlotte, no?”

  “Charlene!”

  “The green-eyed Charlene! Close enough, no?”

  “Do you want to sleep with me, sir, because you like me, or do you want to sleep with me because you’re too drunk to care?”

  Ah, so that was it, and a good question, one the intoxicated premier now had to worry his way through. Never before had he encountered an objection laced with such pert eloquence.

  Just then came a frantic knocking at the door.

  Unsteady on his feet, wearing only briefs and socks held in place by garters, Duplessis swung open the oversized door to confront his aide. “Imbecile! What is it? I forbade you to interrupt—”
/>   “—except in the case of an emergency, sir.”

  “What emergency? Out with it!”

  “The Germans, sir. Hitler. He’s invaded Poland.”

  The premier stood in the doorway, swaying, assessing the news. “Young man,” he declared, after an interval of a half-minute, “Poland is not an emergency!” And slammed shut the door.

  Turning back to the room and his consort for the evening, the most powerful man in the province remarked, “My dear, I am sleeping with you tonight, not because I love you or even know you, not because you are beautiful, although perhaps you are—who can tell under those delightful curls?—but I am sleeping with you because we’ve reached a moment in history that cannot pass without …” He burped, stalled, and swayed awhile. “What was I saying? … commemoration. In time you will recall this fateful day. When Germany invaded Poland, you were in bed with Chef! Is that not reason enough to stay the night?”

  She considered his take on the matter a moment. Then the lady accepted that the justification met her standard.

  Later, smoking, her limbs indelicately akimbo and her round, alabaster face aglow upon the pillow, her hair finally off her face, she inquired of him, “What will become of us, sir? The world?”

  Duplessis stretched an arm to retrieve the Scotch. “That, Mademoiselle, remains to be seen.”

  “I’m frightened.”

  “My dear, why trouble yourself? We’re in greater danger of your cigarette igniting the mattress than we are from Hitler in Poland. Who is your premier?”

  “You are, of course. Maurice Duplessis.”

  “In whose arms do you lie tonight?”

  “In yours, sir. Still, I worry. What will I do when you forget me tomorrow?”

  “Don’t let that happen! Be unforgettable tonight!”

  “Oh, sir. What’s a poor girl to do with you?”

  “No one does anything with me, my child. If anything is to be done, I am the one to do it! But don’t despair about this war. A week ago, a speaker was quoted in the papers. He declared that, rather than fight on the battlefields of Europe, French-Canadians will fight on the streets of Montreal!”