Collected Stories. Carol Shields

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      There are two legends surrounding the founding of St. Quay, stories that contain similar elements but that occupy different sides of a coin. In the “good” story, a fourth-century Irish saint called St. Quay arrives in a stone boat to bring Christianity to the wild Breton coast. A bird flies ahead to tell the villagers of his imminent arrival, and the women (why just women?) joyfully run to the shore to greet him, bringing with them armloads of flowers and calling “St. Quay, St. Quay,” guiding the boat to safety with their cries.

      In the second version, the “bad” version, the same bird arrives to say that a stranger is approaching in a stone boat. The women (women again!) of the village are suspicious and hostile, and they run to the shore with rough stalks of gorse in their hands which they brandish ferociously, all the time crying, “Quay, quay,” which means in old Gaelic, “Away, away.”

      Her mother asked Hélène one day which version she preferred, but before Hélène could decide, she herself said, “I think the second version must be true.” Then she qualified. “Not true, of course, not in a real sense, but containing the elements, the fond of truth.”

      “Why?” Hélène asked. She saw the shine on her mother’s face and felt an obligation to keep it there. “Why not the first version?”

      “It’s a matter of perspective,” her mother said. “It’s just where I am now. In my life, I mean. I can believe certain things but not others.”

      Because of the way she said this, and the way she squeezed her eyes shut, Hélène knew her mother was thinking about Roger, the man in Winnipeg she was in love with. She had been in love before, several times. Love, or something like it, was always happening to her.

      But now something had happened to Hélène: she was locked inside a church, chosen somehow, the way characters in stories are chosen. The thought gave her a wavelet of happiness. And a flash of guilty heat. She should not have entered the door; it should not have been unlocked, and she should not be standing here—but she was. And what could she do about it—nothing. The feeling of powerlessness made her calm and almost sleepy. She looked about in the darkness for a place to sit down. There was nothing—no pews, no chairs, only the stone floor.

      She tried the door again. The handle was heavy and made of some dull metal that filled her hand. She set her school bag on the floor and tried turning the handle and pushing on the door at the same time, leaning her shoulder into the wood. Then she pulled the door toward her, rattled it sharply and pushed it out again.

      “Open,” she said out loud, and heard a partial echo float to the roof. It contained, surprisingly, the half-bright tone of triumph.

      “I’m fourteen years old and locked in a French church.” These words slid out like a text she had been asked to read aloud. Calm sounds surrounded by their own well of calm; this was a fact. It was no more and no less than what had happened.

      Perhaps there was another door. She began to look around. The windows, high up along the length of the church, let in soft arches of webbed light, but the light was fading fast. It was almost five o’clock and would be dark, she knew, in half an hour. Her mother would be waiting at home, the kitchen light on already, something started for supper.

      High overhead was a dense, gray collision of dark beams and stone arches, and the arches were joined in such a way that curving shadows were formed, each of them like the quarter slice out of a circle. Hélène had made such curves with her pencil and compass under the direction of Sister Ste. Adolphe at the village school, and had been rewarded with a dainty-toothed smile and a low murmur, “Très, très bon.” Sister Ste. Adolphe gave her extra pencils, showed her every favor, favors that, instead of exciting envy among the girls, stirred their approval. Hélène was a foreigner and deserved privileges. It was just.

      It occurred to Hélène that there must have been a reason for the church to be open. Perhaps there was a workman about, or perhaps Father Dominic himself had come to see that the church was safe and undisturbed during its long sleep between festivals.

      “Hello,” she called out. “Bonjour. Is there anyone here?” She stood still, pulling her coat more closely around her and waiting for an answer.

      While she waited, she imagined two versions of her death. She would be discovered in the spring when the doors were flung open for the festival. The crowds, rushing in with armloads of flowers, would discover what was left of her, a small skeleton, odorless, as neat on the floor as a heap of stacked kindling, and the school bag nearby with its books and pencils and notebooks would provide the necessary identification.

      Or some miracle of transcendence might occur. This was a church, after all, and close by was the sea. She might be lifted aloft and found with long strands of seaweed in her hair; her skin would be bleached and preserved so that it gleamed with the lustre of certain kinds of shells, and her lips, caked with salt, would be parted to suggest a simple attitude of prayerfulness. (She and her mother, in their ten days of wandering, had visited the grave of an imbecile, a poor witless man who had lived as a hermit in the fourteenth century. It was said, a short time after his death and burial, that a villager had noticed a golden lily growing from the hermit’s grave, and when the body was exhumed it was discovered that the bulb of the plant was located in his throat, a testimonial to his true worth and a rebuke to those who had ignored him in his life.)

      It occurred to Hélène that her mother would blame herself and not France. Lately, she was always saying, “One thing about France, the coffee has real flavor.” Or, “At least the French aren’t sentimental about animals,” or, “You can say one thing for France: things are expensive, but quality is high.” It seemed her mother was compelled to justify this place where she had deliberately settled down to being lonely and uncomfortable and unhappy.

      It had all been a mistake, and now her mother, though she didn’t say it, longed for home and for Roger. “A man friend” is what she called Roger, saying this phrase with special emphasis as though it was an old joke with a low wattage of energy left in it. Roger loved her and wanted to marry her. They had known each other for two years. His first wife had left him. “He’s very bitter,” Hélène’s mother said, “and for someone like Roger, this can be a terrible blow, a great humiliation.”

      He was a chef at the Convention Center in downtown Winnipeg. When he was a young man, he had been taken into the kitchens of the Ritz Carleton in Montreal, where he had learned sauces and pastries and salads. He had learned to make sculptures out of butter or lard or ice or sugar, and even—for it was an arduous apprenticeship, he tells Hélène—how to fold linen table napkins in twenty classic folds. Would she like a demonstration? She had said yes, despising herself, and Roger had instantly obliged, but he could remember only thirteen of the twenty ways. Now, at the Convention Center, he seldom does any cooking himself, but supervises the kitchen from a little office where he spends his time answering the phone and keeping track of grocery orders.

      On Saturday nights he used to come to the apartment in St. Vital where Hélène and her mother lived, and there in the tiny kitchen he made them veal in cream or croquettes or a dish of steamed fish, pickerel with white mushrooms and pieces of green onion.

      “Tell me what you like best,” he’d say to Hélène, “and next week I’ll try it out on you.”

      Of course, he often stayed the night. He was astonishingly neat, never leaving so much as a toothbrush in the bathroom. On Sunday mornings he made them poached eggs on toast—ducks in their nests he called them. He had a trick with the eggs, lifting them from the simmering water with a spatula, then flipping them onto a clean, cotton tea towel, СКАЧАТЬ